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            Sadly too many VoIP sites are run by scammers but it was a different kind of scam that I encountered when recently I did an asterisk related search on Google.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/scam3-t.jpg" alt=""></p>

            The URL shown on the results page is very different from where I ended up (after a redirect)
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/scam-t.jpg" alt="">
                <img src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/scam2-t.jpg" alt="">

                Microsoft Security Warning? You idiot this is a mac. I don't have a disk named C and I don't have a disk named D. But Windows users are likely to fall for these things and if they do, that's exactly what they deserve.

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VoIP and Scams.

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            It's not often that I reboot my mac, so it wasn't until many weeks after the last mac security update was issued that I was prompted to install it. That stupid dialog only pops up just after you login unfortunately it doesn't have a 'Hell No' button caused I am most definitely not going to install any more mac updats if I can avoid it (yeah you are welcome to attack if you want (but I am beind a NAT and I usually work on my linux Desktop))
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/apple-network.jpg" alt=""></p>

            The last time I&nbsp; updated it resulted in that notorious 'your network settings have been changed by another application' dialog popping up. It appeared at a most inconvinient time - when I was trying to get connected to the wifi link at a friends office. As thousands of others have found out before me, no amount of clicking on it will make the rediculous dialog go away. So I had no choice but to pack up and go home and get online with my Linux box to find the cure. What's the cure?
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Go to Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and delete the following (suggest make copies to the desktop first if in doubt):
                com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
                NetworkInterfaces.plist
                preferences.plist
                com.apple.nat.plist
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            The above remedy is not something I came up with on my own - i found it on a site - several sites in fact. It has plagarised so often that it's impossible to find the original source - so I am not going to give a link.
            The same update caused my father's bluetooth mouse to stop working - the update had effected his bluetooth preferences instead of the network preferences.

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Security Update? No thank you.

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            The net is crawling once again (as you can see from the stats below). For once I can't put the blame on my Internet Service Provider because a submarine cable (in fact several cables) have been cut off and traffic is being rerouted. Lankabell. My ISP usually relies on Flagtel the company that owns the cables that are effected now they are using the services of VSNL.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.speedtest.net"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/376136864.png" alt=""></a></p>
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.speedtest.net"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/376138467.png" alt=""></a></p>

            The cable being cut would probably explain the test against the speed test servers in the UK but why is it so slow to mumbai. That's because the idiots running the show at my ISP apparently send packets all the way to the UK and then back to India. That would explain why sites in east asia are also slow.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.speedtest.net"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/376139282.png" alt=""></a></p>

            To travel to UK you would need to go in one direction and a completely opposite direction to get to KL.

            Because dialog broadband sends a lot of their traffic through KL, I suspect that they are not as badly effected as SLT and Lanka Bell.

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Submarine cables severed.

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            Someone threw a shoe at George W Bush and when I tried to check it out the video wouldn't play. Firefox just gave me a gray box. Has the Sri Lankan government started censoring the web as&nbsp; they have being threatening to? Perhaps it's the US government that's doing it. Apparently it's not censorship after all&nbsp; because Download Helper can grab the video off YouTube. But VLC wouldn't play the locally saved video. It just says 'Bus error' and dies off. Mplayer crashed too. It's crash message (when your run it&nbsp; from the command line) states the obvious:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">MPlayer interrupted by signal 7 in module: ao2_init</span>
                <em><span style="color: #660000;">- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.</span></em>
                <span style="color: #330000;">It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
                    gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
                    DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
                    won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.</span>

                Has the Secret Service introduced a Trojan for Linux? Is there some global conspiracy? Tried running Firefox from the command line to see if it could shed some light on it. It could:
            </p>
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 150px;">

                which: no soundwrapper in (/home/raditha/bin:/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/java.6/bin)
                which: no soundwrapper in (/home/raditha/bin:/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/java.6/bin)
                <pre>(npviewer.bin:1828): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_style_detach: assertion `style-&gt;attach_count &gt; 0' failed
which: no soundwrapper in (/home/raditha/bin:/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/java.6/bin)

(npviewer.bin:1850): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_style_detach: assertion `style-&gt;attach_count &gt; 0' failed
(npviewer.bin:1850): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_destroy: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

which: no soundwrapper in (/home/raditha/bin:/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/java.6/bin)
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NPP_WriteReady() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NPP_Write() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NPP_DestroyStream() invoke: Connection closed

(firefox:1546): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_hash_table_remove_internal: assertion `hash_table != NULL' failed
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NPP_URLNotify() invoke: Connection closed</pre>
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            But why is Firefox frenetically saying the same thing about a missing soundwrapper over and over again? Psyops no doubt but it could also have something to do with the earlier issue of <a href="2215.html">flash videos being muted</a>.

            Syslog had an error message too, it was less verbose but it's again something that should not have been
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Dec5 16:56:55 localhost kernel: npviewer.bin[32310]: segfault at 694 ip 00000000010063f1 sp 00000000ff9338d0 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[dbd000+951000]</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            I decided to forget the whole thing and tried to concentrate on my work, not so easy when you are waiting for secret service agents to knock on your door.&nbsp; They have taken over Netbeans too.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">/home/raditha/jbproject/rup4/nbproject/build-impl.xml:411: Problem creating jar: No space left on device
                    BUILD FAILED (total time: 8 seconds)</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Hey wait a minute, that error says the disk is full, but the disk in question is nothing more than /dev/shm/ - that's where pulseaudio writes it's log. So there is no conspiracy or trojans after all. Firefox Flash Plugin, VLC and Mplayer all failed because PulseAudio failed. But who or what caused /dev/shm to get filled up? It turns out there was a folder named rMD-session-2258&nbsp; with nearly 1 GB of data in it (my /dev/shm/ has been configured to be 1GB)

            The culprit was <em>GTK Record My Desktop</em> a forgotten instance of it had created that directory and it had put all it's temp files there, it had only stopped after all the space had been eaten away. ! Killed it immidiately. Cleaned up the shared memory device and now I know that president Bush has pretty good reflex. He probably does 50 ducks in the gym everyday to be prepared for these incidences.

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Bush Video Censored?

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            After having done a lot of speed tests with Sri Lankan broadband companies, I wondered&nbsp; if people living in other countries have to suffer through the same problems with their ISPs as well. According to some of the <a href="2334.html#respond">comments</a> posted on previous blog posts apparently they do. really do get the speeds advertised by their ISP. In some places apparently you do but not in others. So I asked some friends and relatives to do a speedtest and share the result with me.
            <p style="text-align: left;">Here is a test result from my sister in NYC</p>
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/353472587.png" alt=""></p>

            Here is another one from my sister again from NYC. I think one is from her uni (Wi Fi) while the other is from the apartment (which is which? she didn't say). One runs at nearly 10mbps while the other runs at less than 1mbps, yet upload speeds are about the same.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/352868581.png" alt=""></p>

            Apparently, the service provider dragged their feet for more than a month before connecting up the apartment, even then the modem they sent was faulty, So I guess there isn't that much of a difference between New York and Colombo, but wait there is a difference they replaced the modem free of charge.

            This is from Sakkraya in Melbourne:
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351072709.png" alt=""></p>
            <p style="text-align: center;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">this is a 2mbps leased line that's why uploads and downloads speeds are similar. If you would like to share your connection speed, please be so kind as to add a comment with a link to your <a href="https://www.speedtest.net">speed test image</a>.</p>

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Broadband speeds in different parts of the world.

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            <p></p>
            <p>It's been a long long time since I used anything other than <a href="http://www.analog.cx/">analog</a> to process my web server log files. My own analyzer - Log Mine is still half baked (heck it's hardly even ready for the oven after all these years). Analog itself is showing signs of age and hasn't been updated in a long time. So I decided to take another look at Webalizer. My <a href="000710.html">last experiment</a> with it was more than three years ago.</p>
            <p>At the time, webalizer couldn't process your log file if it's in a custom log format. Fortunately they seem to have <a href="http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/faq.asp?qid=q20041208-01&amp;topic=webalizer">added that feature</a> in recent times. Your need to look at your apache configuration file and make a similar entry in&nbsp; webalizer.conf In order to make my the logs acceptable to it. In my case the following line had to be added:</p>
            <p>ApacheLogFormat %h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-agent}i" %v</p>
            <p>Yet, even after doing so the parser continued to ignore every single line in the log. Then It occurred to me that webalizer might be ignoring the log file because of an existing history file. Sure enough getting rid of /var/www/usage/* along with /var/lib/webalizer/webalizer.hist and /var/lib/webalizer/webalizer.current did the trick.</p>
            <p>I sure wish the output was easier on the eye though. Little things like ',' to separate thousands and a little bit of padding inside the table cells would go a long way.</p>
            <p>The reason that I decided to have another look at other log analyzers is because the huge discrepency between the number of impressions reported by adsense and the number of page views reported by analog. There is at times a five fold difference.&nbsp; I was even tempted to sign up for openx for that reason.</p>
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Webalizer Take II

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            <p>Having sorted out the <a href="2209.html">problem with sounds on MythTv</a> it's time to turn my attention to flash movies - they are playing fine on my Fedora 10 installation but with out the sound. Before upgrading to F10 I had flash setup correctly. I did so by adding the adobe repository to YUM, installing the RPM and runningï¿½ 'mozilla-plugin-config' to make Adobe's 32bit plugin compatible with the 64 bit browser. Now it's gone mute.</p>
            <p>It is suggested on some sites (eg <a href="http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f9.html#flash">mjmwired</a> , <a href="https://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/11/firefox-no-sound-on-flash-videos.html">Chitlesh Goorah</a>) that you need to install the the libflashsupport rpm. Only trouble with that is the fact that there isn't such an RPM for <a href="2342.html">F10</a>. Come to think of it, I suspect the whole reason for sound to be disabled on flash videos is because the installer would have marked the package as being obsolete and removed it.</p>
            <p>So what I did to solve the problem was to install it right back from the Fedora 9 DVD. And once the browser was restarted, I find that flash videos do play with the sounds on.</p>
            <p></p>

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Sound and Flash Movies.

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            <p>It seems like only yesterday that I decided not to upgrade to wordpres 2.6.5 - hang on a second it was yesterday! Well that decision is obsolete now with WP 2.7 out and well , i have taken the plunge and done the update - piece of cake really. Wish <a href="2121.html">Fedora updates</a> were as smooth as this.</p>
            <p>There was just one very minor issue advanced permalink migration plugin stopped working momentarily. However whent the perlamlinks structures were recreated it started working again. I suspect that has something to do with the db schema for the new version being&nbsp; different from the old and that effecting the way the plugins' data is stored.</p>
            <p>I like the new dashboard but I have started to hate the new version of the visual editor already. It seems to be apallingly sluggish (2.6.3 certainly didn't have that problem) let's see what can be done about it. Amonghts other new features, I like the fact that threaded comments have finally been made into a feature. I looked at more about half a dozen threaded comment plugins before deciding that all of them were too much trouble. The database had what's needed for threaded comments for quite a while, glad to see the code catch up with it.</p>
            <p>In other matters, I have signed up with <a href="http://openx.org">openx</a> - an adserver + ad marketplace. Well the market place really hasn't got off the ground yet but I am not allowed to comment more than that for the moment. I signed up for this because like most geek webmasters, I am <a href="1659.html">disapointed with adsense</a>. What's worse there is a large descrepency between the number of page views reported by analog and webalizer and the number of impressions reported by adsense.&nbsp; I have tried ot adbrite as well but it seems to be <a href="2047.html">full of scammers. </a>No not adbrite itself. Most of the products and services advertised on adbrite smells like a <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/archives/fishing-camp.html">fishing camp</a>.</p>
            <p></p>

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Python and Tidy.

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            All kinds of problems screamed for attention after updating from <a href="2121.html">Fedora 9 to Fedora 10.</a> Zoiper the softphone by digium wouldn't start up. The following message pops up. If you try to run it from the command line a more detailed error message can be seen:
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/zoiper.jpg" alt="zoiper softphone for asterisk"></p>

            Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

            This error is in spite of an rpm by the name of libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-2.fc10.x86_64.rpm&nbsp; being already installed. I suspected that this might be because zoiper is linked against the 32 bit version of that library. It is exactly the same <a href="2234.html">error that effected netbeans</a>. Initially I wasn't keen to install the 32 bit library since I have had enough trouble in the past by mixing 32bit and 64 bit libraries. This time though I had no choice because being able to use netbeans is an absolute must.

            Mythv no longer has any sounds. The very first time I <a href="1341.html">installed it</a>, I only managed to get it working after a long struggle and certainly don't look forward to doing that all over again. The fact that the gnome menu which usually has a tendency to disappears continues to remain visible when mythtv is running in full screen mode seems to pale into insignificance. Cleaning the yum meta data and <a href="2209.html">reinstalling</a> seems to fix these issues.

            You cannot login as root. Fix is described at <a href="https://rivviepop.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/enable-root-gdm-gnome-login-with-fedora-10/">http://rivviepop.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/enable-root-gdm-gnome-login-with-fedora-10/</a>

            Next problem child was mplayer.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libgpm.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Querying the rpm database shows that GPM is installed but why do I have a 32 bit version as well a 64 bit version?
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">gpm-devel-1.20.5-1.fc10.x86_64</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">gpm-devel-1.20.5-1.fc10.i386</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">gpm-1.20.5-1.fc10.x86_64</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">gpm-1.20.5-1.fc10.i386</p>

            Removing the 32 bit version does not make the problem go away. I then thought of updating mplayer because the version installed was mplayer.0-63.01_rc2.fc9.x86_64. Apparently it had been left behind like so many other. However yum insisted that no updates are available. Digging further I discovered that the version listed in the atrpms repo is the one I have installed while there is a more recent version in rpmfusion. The solution then is to disable the atrpms repository and update from rpmfusion
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">yum update mplayer --disablerepo=atrpms</p>

            Yum still insisted that there are no updates available. Now annoyed, I removed mplayer and installed it again. That meant I had to reinstall Kino, Lives and xvidcap as well since they all had mplayer marked as a dependency. Xvidcap crashes quite often particularly if the area of the screen you have chosen for capture happens to be large. I hoped that installing from rpmfusion will fix that too. But there is no xvidcap in rpmfusion so much for that. What's even worse is that after all this trouble Mplayer still complains about the libgpm.so.1

            Now it's time to cheat: Change into /usr/lib64/ then:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">ln -s libgpm.so.2.1.0 libgpm.so.1</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Now mplayer is playing videos with a vengeance. While you are at it, install smplayer as well. it's a nice front end.

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Fedora 10 glitches part 2

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            I have been having a Wiki on this site at <a href="../../wiki/index.html">http://www.raditha.com/wiki/</a> for nearly four years but was finally forced to take it down because I couldn't keep pace with the spam bots. The last straw came when I ran into the following error while trying to clean up after the vandals.
            <h3 style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Database error</span></h3>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see <a title="Raditha.com:Searching" href="https://www.raditha.com/wiki/Raditha.com:Searching">Searching Raditha.com</a>), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:</span></p>

            <blockquote style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;"><tt>INSERT INTO archive (ar_namespace,ar_title,ar_text,ar_comment,ar_user,ar_user_text,ar_timestamp,ar_minor_edit,ar_flags) SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text,cur_comment,cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,0 FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace=3 AND cur_title='Alis'</tt></span></blockquote>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">from within function "<tt>Article::doDeleteArticle</tt>". MySQL returned error "<tt>1114: The table 'archive' is full</tt>".</span></p>

            <div class="printfooter"></div>
            There has been so much spam over the last few years that the MySQL table is full. I was tempted to clean up the database, update the mediawiki software used to power the wiki and start all over but then realized that it's a lot of hard work for little return.

            During the early days, there were a few usefull contributions to the wiki but later on they were inundated by spam. Nearly every legit contribution was accidentally deleted while cleaning up spam. Some pages would be hit even 40-50 times a minute (no wonder the database filled up). I tried combating it by using the mediawiki block list and IPtables. Entire subnets were filtered out to no avail. The spam kept increased and never showed signs of decreasing.

            Trouble might have been averted if I had kept mediawiki upto date but that didn't happen. Unlike most CMS style web applications it's not possible to 'skip versions with mediawiki'. Well it might be possible now but it wasn't always so. That means if you can't keep up with all their new releases, it becomes harder and hard to do the update. I gave up years ago.

            In the end I just relied on wget and a small python script that I wrote to convert all the wiki entries into PHP. There are only a few (too few really, yeah pathetically few if you would call a spade a spade) pages which means all the time and effort spent on it is just a waste.

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Bye Bye Wiki

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            Needed to make a small change to my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com">photoblog</a> - a change that should be reflected on every single post.&nbsp; Thought I might be able to use python DOM to get it done. With PHP it's quite easy, I have done that sort of thing many times in the past.

            Can't that be handled by the template? no because this was a CSS change that really did involve changing the post's HTML.&nbsp; It was just a matter of removing an inline style (CSS) and replacing it with a CSS class. But each post only has a fragment so python minidom simply refused parse it. That forced me to look at HTMLParser which I didn't like because it's an old fashion event driven parser. There was a time when use to swear by event driven parsers (expat for example) but that was long ago.

            Thus I had no option but to revert to the minidom API and to make my HTML fragment well formed by adding a new start and end tag to enclose the whole fragment. These enclosing tags can be stripped out later when I am saving the modified post back to the database.

            With this approach the code is short and sweet. But of course I need to flesh it out by adding support for retrieving posts from the database and writing them back in, instead of working with the hardcoded bit of HTML as done during testing.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">#!/usr/bin/python</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">from xml.dom.minidom import *</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">domNode = parseString('&lt;xml&gt;&lt;p align="center"&gt;&lt;a href="/images/comingup.jpg"&gt;&lt;img src="/images/comingup-t.jpg" title="dawn" alt="Sunrise close to Nuwara Eliya" style="border-color: #505050; border-width: 7px" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;Great Western, Nuwara Eliya at Dawn.&lt;/xml&gt;')</p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">ele = domNode.getElementsByTagName('img')
                ele.item(0).removeAttribute('style')
                ele.item(0).setAttribute("class","photo");
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">subNode = domNode.firstChild;</p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">if subNode.hasChildNodes():
                children = subNode.childNodes
                for child in children:
                print child.toxml()
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

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Parsing HTML with Python.

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            <p></p>
            <p>Ever since I switched to <a href="1484.html">Wordpress from Movable Type</a> a few months ago. I have wanted to change the permalink structure. The scheme in use was just to have the post id (padded with zeros to make it appear to be a six digit number ( "%06d" ). I wanted to change the links to the postname but the older posts should remain unchanged because they have a few incoming links and many others figure high for a few search terms.</p>
            <p>The first plugin I looked at was <a href="http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/">Dean's Permalink migration plugin</a>. In fact I even used it on my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">photoblog</a> which doesn't get a lot of traffic. Dean's plugin will redirect (302) old permalinks to the new structure so it wasn't suited for this blog. After scratching around a bit more I came across the <a href="http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/advanced-permalinks/">Advanced Permalink Migration Plugin</a> but it wasn't working as well as I had hoped. The idea with the Advanced Permalink plugin is that you can change your structure as often as you like. You can use one scheme for a range of posts (say 1 - 1000) and something completely different for the next set (say 1001 - 1250). There is no redirection involved. Just apache URL rewrites.</p>
            <p>Even with Dean's plugin the <a href="1698.html">category links were all failing</a> things were no different wtih the new one either. In some instances clicking on a category link took you to the first post in that category at other times it produced a 404. The only thing that never happened was the link taking you to the category page like it was supposed to.</p>
            <p>I put it on the backburner for a while but took it out and put it under the microscope with the help of the <a href="1962.html">Netbeans IDE or PHP</a>. After a lot of debugging I found that the reason for the failure was because the plugin needed to have a 'category base' define in wp admin -&gt; settings -&gt; permalinks.</p>
            <p></p>

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Solving the permalink migration mystery.

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            <p>Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never posted a video on Youtube and thought I would make my debut with a video of the Fedora 10 bootup. I had seen a few choppy videos that were generated by someone holding a camera at their monitor. Surely even I can do better than that. All that's needed is to capture the screen while an F10 guest started up on my Desktop (by using <a href="2112.html">VirtualBox or Qemu</a>).</p>
            <p>To do that I first tried Istanbul. While it's a pretty nice software it can only produce ogg files. The only video editing software on my machine (<a href="http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/">avdemux2</a>) couldn't handle that (incidentally I have never ever edited a video in my whole life). I thought of trying other video editing software. Lives is something that I looked at but couldn't make head or tail of it's user interface. Cinelerra was even worse. Then I tried using VLC to convert from ogg to other formats but VLC always complained about missing codecs and bailed out.</p>
            <p>These issues with codecs happens to be one of the problems that RPM Fusion is trying to solve (well I didn't have that in my repo list at the time, and Livna I had taken down sometime back because it lead to so many conflicts.). I thought RPM fusion can wait and decided to try changing the video capture tool. I immediately met with success. <a href="http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/">Xvidcap</a> is the tool that I used to record my first video and it's output can be easily edited by avidemux without having to bother with conversions.</p>
            <p>The video was well recieved actually and even has a five star rating. Not bad for a beginner huh? You can see it&nbsp; -&gt; <a href="2156.html">here</a> &lt;-</p>
            <p></p>

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Linux Desktop Recording.

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            <p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" height="385" width="480">
                    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
                    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always">
                    <param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xmbLIURFPvg&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xmbLIURFPvg&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480">
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            <p>I am ashamed to say this but some of my best friends and even <a href="1312.html">my own mother still uses windows</a>. Even those friends and relatives who are fed up with Windows are strangely reluctant to switch. They are asking whether it's possible to dual boot windows and linux. Dual boot is the stone age way of doing things. Now with everyone having 64 bit processors virtualization is the way to go. All 64 bit processors support para virtualization so the guest operating system will run just as fast as the host.</p>
            <p>This video demonstrates how to install Fedora 10 as a Guest. In this case the host is also a linux box but <a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads">VirtualBox is available for windows</a> too and looks exactly the same. Most people will realize that there are fewer questions to answer and installation takes much less time than a windows installation. That video has been edited but installation is still very quick.</p>

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Video Howto : Fedora 10 Installation

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            It's hard to imagine how any ISP anywhere in the world can do worse than Lanka Bell Broadband has done over the past few months. Well Lanka Bell just did! They have outdone themselves, they have jumped from one failure a week to two failures a week.

            The ink hasn't even dried on my post about Monday's <a href="2283.html">service disruption</a> when it has happened again today. This time it's not completely offline just massive packet losses.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">64 bytes from yx-in-f100.google.com (74.125.45.100): icmp_seq=282 ttl=239 time=707 ms
                64 bytes from yx-in-f100.google.com (74.125.45.100): icmp_seq=285 ttl=239 time=847 ms
                64 bytes from yx-in-f100.google.com (74.125.45.100): icmp_seq=290 ttl=239 time=782 ms
                64 bytes from yx-in-f100.google.com (74.125.45.100): icmp_seq=291 ttl=239 time=822 ms
                ^C
                --- google.com ping statistics ---
                322 packets transmitted, 40 received, 87% packet loss, time 321559ms

                It's better to have a complete failure than a pathetic slow down like this because you are tempted to carry on with your work and get hugely frustrated when mail clients times out and web pages take forever to load.

                The moron in charge of Lankabells routers has apparently changed the path for most packets heading out of the country. Now they are send through VSNL while earlier they were being sent through Flagtel
            </p>
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; width: 500px; height: 150px;">traceroute to google.com traceroute to google.com (209.85.171.100), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
                1 10.12.0.17 (10.12.0.17) 36.584 ms 42.136 ms 47.098 ms
                2 10.12.2.114 (10.12.2.114) 47.347 ms 47.579 ms 47.726 ms
                3 59.163.253.206.static.vsnl.net.in (59.163.253.206) 361.624 ms 367.662 ms 367.825 ms
                4 59.163.16.1.static.vsnl.net.in (59.163.16.1) 368.096 ms 368.256 ms *
                5 59.163.16.1.static.vsnl.net.in (59.163.16.1) 372.029 ms 372.261 ms *
                6 59.163.16.134.static.vsnl.net.in (59.163.16.134) 436.614 ms 399.798 ms 395.085 ms
                7 219.64.231.1.mpls-vpn-sj.static.vsnl.net.in (219.64.231.1) 344.553 ms 348.931 ms 354.040 ms
                8 209.85.240.114 (209.85.240.114) 353.768 ms 344.424 ms 344.028 ms
                9 (72.14.232.138) 370.391 ms 373.889 ms 216.239.49.198 (216.239.49.198) 373.497 ms
                10 (72.14.236.164) 375.276 ms 209.85.250.147 (209.85.250.147) 370.309 ms 355.806 ms
                11 216.239.48.134 (216.239.48.134) 365.422 ms 360.927 ms 216.239.46.203 (216.239.46.203) 360.436 ms
                12 216.239.48.141 (216.239.48.141) 355.221 ms 209.85.251.129 (209.85.251.129) 370.138 ms 370.113 ms
                13 209.85.251.145 (209.85.251.145) 364.860 ms 359.748 ms 74.125.30.134 (74.125.30.134) 363.212 ms
                14 cg-in-f100.google.com (209.85.171.100) 359.279 ms 74.125.31.134 (74.125.31.134) 374.295 ms 374.227 ms</div>
            This traceroute dump doesn't always show up. What you usually see is stars ( * * * ) the usual indication for a timeout

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Mean time between failures.

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            My Desktop's menu says mythtv is installed. I can even run it and watch TV. But it doesn't have any sounds. Mythtv has been muted. I reckoned updating it ought to fix it ( F9 -&gt; F10 upgrade will leave this behind because it comes from third party repositories).
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/mythtv.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/mythtv-t.jpg" alt="mythtv"></a></p>

            YUM&nbsp; has it's own ideas and tells me that mythtv isn't installed and therefor cannot be updated.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Setting up Update Process
                Package(s) mythtv-frontend available, but not installed.
                No Packages marked for Update
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Doing <em>rpm -qa | grep myth -i</em> shows up nothing and hence doesn't confirms it's presence or absence&nbsp; (but I tell you, it is installed!). However yum is quite happy to install it again (doesn't complain about the package being already installed but does have trouble with dependencies).
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 150px; margin-bottom:14px">Resolving Dependencies
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package mythtv-frontend.x86_64 0:0.21-13.fc10 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: mythtv-base-themes = 0.21 for package: mythtv-frontend

                ....
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: libmythfreemheg-0.21.so.0()(64bit) for package: mythtv-frontend
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: libmythavcodec-0.21.so.0()(64bit) for package: mythtv-frontend
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package mythtv-base-themes.x86_64 0:0.21-13.fc10 set to be updated
                ---&gt; Package lame.x86_64 0:3.98.2-19.1.fc9_92 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: libmp3lame0 = 3.98.2-19.1.fc9_92 for package: lame
                ---&gt; Package mythtv-common.x86_64 0:0.21-13.fc10 set to be updated
                ---&gt; Package libmyth.x86_64 0:0.21-13.fc10 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: qt3-MySQL for package: libmyth
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package libmp3lame0.x86_64 0:3.98.2-19.1.fc9_92 set to be updated
                ---&gt; Package qt3-MySQL.x86_64 0:3.3.8b-12.fc9 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: qt3 = 3.3.8b-12.fc9 for package: qt3-MySQL
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package qt3.i386 0:3.3.8b-12.fc9 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: libmng.so.1 for package: qt3
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package libmng.i386 0:1.0.9-6.1 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: liblcms.so.1 for package: libmng
                --&gt; Running transaction check
                ---&gt; Package lcms-libs.i386 0:1.17-4.fc9 set to be updated
                --&gt; Processing Dependency: lcms = 1.17-4.fc9 for package: lcms-libs
                --&gt; Finished Dependency Resolution
                lcms-libs-1.17-4.fc9.i386 from fedora has depsolving problems
                --&gt; Missing Dependency: lcms = 1.17-4.fc9 is needed by package lcms-libs-1.17-4.fc9.i386 (fedora)
                Error: Missing Dependency: lcms = 1.17-4.fc9 is needed by package lcms-libs-1.17-4.fc9.i386 (fedora)</div>
            There is a lcms RPM on my system but it's version number is newer than the one that mythtv depends on. When you mix RPMs from serveral sources you do run into problems like this.&nbsp; Uninstalling the existing version of lcms-libs&nbsp; ( lcms-libs-1.17-6.fc10.x86_64 ) and putting in the one that mythtv likes is out of the question because there are 75 other packages that are dependent on the existing version.

            Looking more closely at the above dependency resolution log, It seems like the trouble is actually caused by qt3-Mysql&nbsp; it's asking for a 32bit version of Qt which in turn asks for another 32 bit library and ends up at the 32bit lcms library leading to the conflict.

            I reckoned cleaning up the metadata might solve it so I tried 'yum clean metadata' and then did 'yum install qt3-MySQL'. It ran to completion this time. And this time around 'yum update mythtv-frontend' doesn't choke on the mixed up dependency. So the solution is indeed to run 'yum clean metadata'

            Now I have sound back on mythtv and I also have two instances of myth frontend on my menu! but still no sound in in the flash plugin for firefox.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/mythtv2.jpg" alt=""></p>

            All these problems were encountered wtih Fedora 10 Preview. By the time I updated to the gold, I had fixed them so there wasn't a chance to find out if it's present in that release as well. Double vision in the desktop men however didn't go away even with the <a href="2265.html">gold</a>.

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MythTv

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            The following comparisons were done at an office in Peliyagoda where they have two WiMax connections (both 2mbps) attached to the same router. In actual fact the router is a Linux Box with IPTables running and doubles as the mail server for the organization. It has three network cards on it.
            <p style="margin: 4px auto; padding: 2px; width: 350px; background-color: #ececed; text-align: center;"><strong>Maldives Test Server</strong></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351636519.png" alt=""></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351641970.png" alt=""></p>
            <p style="margin: 4px auto; padding: 2px; width: 350px; background-color: #ececed; text-align: center;"><strong>London Test Server</strong></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351637099.png" alt=""></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351642299.png" alt=""></p>

            When I did the above tests, I also tested against speedtest.net's servers in New York. Unfortunately, I forgot to save the result for lanka bell!&nbsp; What's given below is the result generated by testing at Battaramulla (on a 2mbps Lanka Bell link). Don't draw any conclusion from it because the locations and the dates are both different.
            <p style="margin: 4px auto; padding: 2px; width: 350px; background-color: #ececed; text-align: center;"><strong>New York</strong></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/351637514.png" alt=""></p>
            <p style="text-align: center; padding:5px"><img src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/366263351.png" alt=""></p>

            Please see below for additional results from past tests.
            <ul>
                <li><a href="1810.html">Who Pulled the hand brake?</a></li>
                <li>Lanka Bell <a href="1456.html">crawls to a halt.</a></li>
                <li><a href="1452.html">Dialog vs Bell speed comparision</a></li>
                <li><a href="1397.html">SLT ADSL (512kbps) speed test</a></li>
                <li><a href="1397.html">Dialog 3g</a> (over Bluetooth)</li>
                <li>Another bell <a href="1470.html">speed test</a></li>
            </ul>

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Sri Lanka Broadband Speed Comparison.

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            <p></p>
            <p>Today, I am going to do the unthinkable and apply for an SLT ADSL connection. I was a long time ADSL user and found their services to be horrible. Their customer support is unbelievably bad, <a href="1092.html">SMTP servers</a> are frequently listed in blackhole lists and <a href="1397.html">speeds very low</a>.</p>
            <p>Being disgusted with SLT, I obtained a Dialog WiMax connection. Getting the connection was like <a href="1296.html">pulling teeth</a> and service disruptions were worse than with SLT and customer support just as bad. Dialog Telekom, once the premier ICT company in Sri Lanka and the largest company on the Colombo Stock Exchange is now in the red. Dialog Broadband is largely responsible for that. Their services to descended to <a href="1460.html">farcial levels</a> and I gave up on them and switched to Lanka Bell.</p>
            <p>Lankabell broadband (which is also WiMax like Dialog) is worse than the other two. Hardly a week passes by without a disruption. Usually it's hours before service is restored. Sometimes it takes them <a href="2069.html">more than a full day</a> to get online again. At other times <a href="2243.html">speed drops to a crawl</a>.</p>
            <p>In hind sight SLT ADSL was never that bad. Though it was slow and customer support was terrible, when they had service disruptions, they were pretty quick to fix it. That's probably because they have a larger customer base and get lot of complaints. Dialog WiMax has only about 5000 users while LankaBell has only about a 1000. Looking at the poor standards they maintain it's not a suprise.</p>
            <p></p>

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SLT ADSL

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            <p>Someone shoot me for being a Lanka Bell Broadband customer. They are offline once again. I seriously doubt if they will fix it anytime soon. <a href="2243.html">Last time</a> they took nearly 2 days to get it back online.</p>
            <p></p>

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Someone shoot me

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            I was delighted when I first heard that Fedora 10 ships with Netbeans. I have been a netbeans user for a long time and was happy to know that I no longer need to install it manually. Sadly the version they ship with Fedora 10 is netbeans 6.1.

            I already had version 6.1 from a previous manual installation. It works fine even on F10. Since I have tweaked all the settings to make the IDE behave exactly the way I want it to, I have no use for another 6.1 installation. More so since I also happen to have a 6.5 nightly build.

            My next approach was to download the IDE+JDK bundle from sun. Normally I don't use that bundle but on this occasion the netbeans mirrors turned out to be painfully slow and anyway I had to update my JDK so I went ahead with it. Unfortunately that IDE doesn't start up. Bails out with :
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Incidentally this same error pops up when I try to launch the zoiper softphone. There is a libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-2.fc10.i386.rpm installed. And that RPM is supposed to provide /usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so so I suspect that zoiper and netbeans are looking for a 32 bit version.

            Zoiper; I can manage with out. Therea re other softphones that are nearly as good but can't say the same about netbeans. It's better than most other IDEs that I have encountered so I had no choice but to install the 32bit version of libcanberra along with it's dependencies and that seems to have solved it.

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Netbeans on Fedora 10.

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            The Fedora 10 <a href="2121.html">Live Update</a> trials I did earlier with my virtual machines went smoothly. That was in stark contrast to the difficulties faced with the upgrade of the host operating system. In other words, a real upgrade on a real system running on real hardware was anything but smooth. Well, perhaps not the upgrade itself, but trouble started just afterward.

            The first problem was that the computer wouldn't start up. Grub complained about a wrong partition (error 22 if I remember correctly). I solved this by putting the DVD back into the drive and booting in rescue mode and the editing grub.conf - Even then,&nbsp; the <a href="2156.html">plymouth splash screen</a> didn't appear (it worked perfectly on my VirtualBox and Qemu guests). Solved it by adding&nbsp; 'vga=0x0318 rhgb quite' to grub.conf

            On boot up, I cannot login to sugar at all. This is not any different from Fedora 9 but I didn't worry too much about it then and I am not worrying now. KDE does start up but the menus are missing. I was a long time KDE user but gave up on it after seeing the <a href="1520.html">new menu</a>, so that doesn't worry me either. Gnome works ok.

            The next problem demanding a solution was Atrpms - the version number of the preview release is 9.93 not 10 there isn't a directory named 9.93 on the atrpm servers. Resulting in the following:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
                    * atrpms: dl.atrpms.net
                    * rawhide: mirror.yandex.ru
                    http://dl.atrpms.net/f9.93-x86_64/atrpms/stable/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: atrpms. Please verify its path and try again</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            This was solved by editing the following line in the yum.conf file and hard coding the version number (expect more trouble when version 11 comes)
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable</p>

            When trying to login through VNC the following message pops up and gnome wouldn't display anything more than a blank screen
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/bonobo.png" alt="Bonobo error on Fedora 10"></p>

            Killing bonobo-activation-server did allow me to login

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Fedora 10 Glitches.

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            <p></p>
            <p>The final release of Fedora 10 was made available a couple of days ago. There was the <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/archives/the-new-arrival.html">early delivery</a> and and the problems with my WiMax connection so it wasn't until a little while ago that I managed to do the updated from Fedora 10 Preview to the Final release. (That too only when the little tyke was sleeping and the other two children finally gave up staring at him and started playing).</p>
            <p>Most of the issues that I had with the preview are still there with the gold release as well. KDE still starts up without the menus but with that fedora "Could not start ksmserver." Check your installation message which no one seems to have a solution for. Sugar doesn't start at all. The screen just flickers and returns to the login screen. Lot's of other things are still broken.</p>
            <p>Even as I was typing this, I had a crash and the update introduced new problems like messing up my grub and causing a boot failure. It just went grub grub grub grub eternally without going to next step and I had to put it right by booting in rescue mode. Even then I didn't get the <a href="2156.html">plymouth boot screen.</a> Well at least power saving is back.</p>
            <p>Will make another post soon and share what ever solutions that I found.</p>
            <p></p>

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Fedora 10 Gold

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            <p></p>
            <p>Yep, you live and you learn. For years I thought you can invoke fdisk only on a physical hard drive. How wrong I was! You can invoke it even on a file (you will then have to manually set cylinders etc etc). This is very usefull when working with Qemu images.</p>
            <p>I didn't know that dd had a 'sparse' option and have often had to wait until it created images for Qemu and encrypted file systems. All you need to do is to make use of the 'seek' option in dd.</p>
            <p>Last but not least, I didn't know that losetup (and mount) had a skip option. That means you can mount virtual partitions inside Qemu images using losetup.</p>
            <p>So I learnt three important things in a day and I thought I was an old dog. I am slightly embarrassed really. All these three things were on a post by <a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/">Karsten M. Self.</a> in a Xen Mailing list.</p>
            <p>The last discovery (losetup offset option) is specially interesting.&nbsp; You can make encrypted file systems even more secure by adding a random number of junk bytes at the start of the image. That would mean the '<em>file</em>' command cannot be used to find out what kind of a file you have and anyone trying to crack it will not only have to deal with the encryption algorithm but also try to guess that random number you have chosen for the padding.</p>
            <p></p>

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Old dogs can learn new tricks

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            <p>You might have noticed that I have an item named religion in my tag cloud. Does that mean I have suddenly become religious? Hello no. Exorcise that thought. Religion is the opium of the poor (well I am not exactly rich but I am not poor and don't do opium). Heaven and hell exists only in the minds of preachers.</p>
            <p>Lots of other geeks are religious though. They would swear by Java, PHP or some poor souls who need to be rescued even swear by primitive things like C# or .NET (windows really does sucks (No that has nothing to do with religion , it's a scientific fact)).</p>
            <p>So this tag, religion is about such arguments like '<a href="1204.html">PHP is better than Java</a>' and 'perl is better than python' (anyone want to compare <a href="1723.html">Fortran and Python</a>?).</p>
            <p>Well what's really better, is it PHP or Java? well it's a matter of horses for courses (but PHP has recently lost the plot a bit with an API that is way too big, but then Java is showing it's age too).</p>
            <p>While still on the subject of religion and religious wars you might ask, Is <a href="1449.html">Fedora better than Debian</a>?&nbsp; Yes Fedora is miles ahead of Debian (but even so, Debian is much better than Windows)</p>
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Religion

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            <p>After using <a href="2112.html">VirtualBox</a> on my desktop for a while I wanted to try it out on my file server. The desktop has a an Intel E6400 CPU but the imagess actually reside on my file server rather than on the desktop itself (I have gigabit ether). I wanted to install VirtualBox on the file server which has an Intel E2180 ( a chip without the vmx flag) to see what the performance would be like.</p>
            <p>The installation itself was straight forward, I just used 'rpm -i VirtualBox-2.0.4_38406_fedora9-1.x86_64.rpm' but once installed the application failed to start up. No error message was produced. When that happens the best thing to do is to try executing it from the command line. The the following error was observed:VirtualBox:</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">supR3HardenedMainGetTrustedMain: dlopen("/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so",) failed: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so: undefined symbol: _ZN10QStatusBar9showEventEP10QShowEvent</p>
            <p>Googling revealed that this is something that happens due to the kernel module not being loaded - which is due to an incompatibility with the kernel version on that machine. The module can be built with&nbsp; '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup' but it complained about not finding the kernel sources even though both the kernel header and the kernel devel packages are installed. Further investigations revealed that the version numbers for both the kernel-devel nd kernel-header packages are different from the kernel iteself. Apparently the last kernel update had gone haywire. No matter it can be easily rectified with a yum update.</p>
            <p>After updating , you need to do a reboot and I tried runnig VirtualBox again. Now I recieved a less cryptic error message:</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">WARNING: The vboxdrv kernel module is not loaded. Either there is no module<br>
                available for the current kernel (2.6.27.5-37.fc9.x86_64) or it failed to<br>
                load. Please recompile the kernel module and install it by</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">
            </p>
            <p>One wonders why this more detailed message wasn't produced the first time around. Recompiling the kernel made no difference anyway. The _ZN10QStatusBar9showEventEP10QShowEvent error still pops up.</p>
            <p>There are few posts in the web on this topic. Some of the suggestions are just laughable, they either blame Fedora (even though Debian and Ubuntu users had also complained) or the kernel version (2.6.25). Well mine was 2.6.26 before the kernel update now it's 2.6.27. Besides I have Virtual Box running on my desktop which has the exact same version of Fedora/Linux Kernel and Glibc as the new installation.</p>
            <p>What I did find was a post about a similar error which blamed Qt for the problem. Looking closely at the error message, it does look like a Qt function. So lets update Qt (yes the version of Qt in rgw two computers happen to be different too)</p>
            <p>Updating Qt didn't work. So I thought to remove the 64 bit VirtualBox rpm and to replace it with the 32bit version. After that the previous error went away, it's place is now taken up by a new one.</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">VirtualBox: supR3HardenedMainGetTrustedMain: dlopen("/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so",) failed: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so: undefined symbol: _ZN7QRegionpLERK5QRect</p>
            <p>Looking closely at this, I am more than convinced that I am barking up the right tree. QRect is surely a Qt function. I even thought to uninstall the 64 bit version and use the 32 bit version of VirtualBox in it's place because I felt there may be an incompatibility due to the fact that this processor does not have the VMX flag.</p>
            <p>I did manage to solve this by first doing 'yum clean all' followed by updating both qt and qt-devel.</p>
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Virtual Box on My Media Server

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            Things go haywire with VirtualBox when the host system wakes up from sleep.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Message from <a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="4f3c363c2320282b0f23202c2e2327203c3b">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> at Nov 17 15:10:33 ...
                    kernel: Code: c0 0f 30 58 8e d8 58 8e c0 5b 41 5c 41 5d 41 5e 41 5f b8 5b f0 ff ff e9 e9 fe ff ff cc cc cc cc b8 ff ff ff ff 48 21 c7 48 31 c0 &lt;0f&gt; 79 fe 73 06 b8 5f f0 ff ff c3 75 05 b8 60 f0 ff ff c3 cc cc</span>

                There is a detailed dump in the syslog
            </p>
            <div style="overflow: auto; height: 120px; margin-left: 30px;">
                <pre>Nov 19 12:22:32 localhost kernel: Code: 57 f3 0f c7 34 24 73 07 b8 5e f0 ff ff eb 07 75 05 b8 5d f0 ff ff 48 83 c4 08 c3 cc cc cc cc 0f 01 c4 c3 cc cc cc cc 48 31 c0 57 &lt;66&gt; 0f c7 34 24 73 05 b8 5f f0 ff ff 48 83 c4 08 c3 cc cc cc cc
Nov 19 12:22:32 localhost kernel: RIP&nbsp; [_end+518288498/2113624756] :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0x6e9e/0x180000
Nov 19 12:22:32 localhost kernel:&nbsp; RSP &lt;ffff81000c495cf8&gt;
Nov 19 12:22:32 localhost kernel: ---[ end trace acf3d78972eadbc4 ]---
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: invalid opcode: 0000 [3] SMP
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: CPU 0
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Modules linked in: nf_nat_ftp iptable_nat nf_nat nf_conntrack_ftp ppp_synctty ppp_async crc_ccitt ppp_generic slhc vboxdrv ib_iser rdma_cm ib_cm iw_cm ib_sa ib_mad ib_core ib_addr iscsi_tcp libiscsi scsi_transport_iscsi coretemp w83627ehf hwmon_vid hwmon fuse sunrpc ipt_REJECT xt_tcpudp nf_conntrack_ipv4 xt_state nf_conntrack iptable_filter ip_tables ip6_tables x_tables xfs reiserfs dm_mirror dm_log dm_multipath dm_mod snd_hda_intel snd_seq_dummy i915 snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_timer snd_page_alloc snd_hwdep snd iTCO_wdt iTCO_vendor_support atl2 8139too drm sr_mod cdrom ppdev pcspkr i2c_algo_bit parport_pc parport skge mii soundcore i2c_i801 i2c_core sg floppy ata_generic ata_piix pata_acpi libata sd_mod scsi_mod ext3 jbd mbcache uhci_hcd ohci_hcd ehci_hcd [last unloaded: kvm]
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Pid: 5456, comm: VirtualBox Tainted: G&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; D&nbsp;&nbsp; 2.6.26.5-45.fc9.x86_64 #1
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RIP: 0010:[_end+518288498/2113624756]&nbsp; [_end+518288498/2113624756] :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0x6e9e/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RSP: 0018:ffff81001d055cf8&nbsp; EFLAGS: 00010046
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: 00000000fffffffe RCX: ffffc2000153c000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RDX: 0000000000000007 RSI: 000000000000000d RDI: 0000000010a26000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RBP: ffff81001d055d28 R08: ffff810026db7810 R09: 0000000000000000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: R10: 0000000000000000 R11: ffffffffa0493e30 R12: ffffc2000153c000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: R13: ffff810026dd2b90 R14: 00000000c0305689 R15: 0000000040ed0e50
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: FS:&nbsp; 0000000040ed1950(0063) GS:ffffffff81417000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: CS:&nbsp; 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 000000008005003b
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: CR2: 00007fb7dc586560 CR3: 000000006716e000 CR4: 00000000000026e0
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Process VirtualBox (pid: 5456, threadinfo ffff81001d054000, task ffff810027d1da80)
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Stack:&nbsp; 0000000010a26000 ffffffffa0493e6e ffff81001d055d38 ffffffffa0497ac2
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; 0000000000000287 ffffc2000153c000 ffff81001d055d58 ffffffffa0497aeb
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; ffff81001d055de8 00000000fffffff9 ffff810026dd2b90 ffff810026dd2b90
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Call Trace:
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518297890/2113624756] ? :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0x934e/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518313334/2113624756] ? :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0xcfa2/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518313375/2113624756] :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0xcfcb/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518314060/2113624756] :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0xd278/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518240346/2113624756] :vboxdrv:supdrvIOCtl+0xe73/0x12d6
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518248073/2113624756] ? :vboxdrv:rtMemAlloc+0xa5/0xdd
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [_end+518225179/2113624756] :vboxdrv:VBoxDrvLinuxIOCtl+0x11d/0x19c
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [hrtick_set+139/252] ? hrtick_set+0x8b/0xfc
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [vfs_ioctl+42/120] vfs_ioctl+0x2a/0x78
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [do_vfs_ioctl+583/609] do_vfs_ioctl+0x247/0x261
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [sys_ioctl+85/119] sys_ioctl+0x55/0x77
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [sys_write+96/111] ? sys_write+0x60/0x6f
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; [system_call_after_swapgs+138/143] system_call_after_swapgs+0x8a/0x8f
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: Code: 57 f3 0f c7 34 24 73 07 b8 5e f0 ff ff eb 07 75 05 b8 5d f0 ff ff 48 83 c4 08 c3 cc cc cc cc 0f 01 c4 c3 cc cc cc cc 48 31 c0 57 &lt;66&gt; 0f c7 34 24 73 05 b8 5f f0 ff ff 48 83 c4 08 c3 cc cc cc cc
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: RIP&nbsp; [_end+518288498/2113624756] :vboxdrv:g_abExecMemory+0x6e9e/0x180000
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel:&nbsp; RSP &lt;ffff81001d055cf8&gt;
Nov 19 12:23:58 localhost kernel: ---[ end trace acf3d78972eadbc4 ]---</pre>
            </div>
            What causes VirtualBox to go mad is usmb - the userspace samba file system. My guest images reside on another computer (my file server). I mount the folder <a href="1740.html">using usmb</a> and then start them up with VirtualBox this way I get a huge speed advantage because the hard drive on my desktop isn't being spun into the ground. I can afford to do this because I have gigabit ethernet.

            When the machine goes to sleep usmb sometimes disconnects. It is acceptable for VirtualBox to gag when that happens but what is not acceptable is for VirtualBox to force me to reboot to fix the error. Of course I can continue to work on the computer doing other tasks but I cannot run another virtual machine till I reboot.
            Restarting the VirtualBox services does not work.
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><span style="color: #330000;"><a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="5c2e3d383528343d1c30333f3d3034332f28">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>:~$ /etc/rc.d/init.d/vboxdrv restart
                    Stopping VirtualBox kernel module&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; [FAILED]
                    (Cannot unload module vboxdrv)</span>

                The kernel absolutely refuses to unload the vboxdrv module. I tried rmmod, i tried modprobe -r, I tried fuser -v /dev/vbox to see which process might be locking it (fuser didn't say). modprobe -r ran through the night without removing the kernel.

                I looked through the process table with a fine tooth comb to find any process that might be even remotely associated with it no luck. The VirtualBox kernel module is hanging on grimly like a barnacle on a ships' keel. This behaviour is the same on F9 and F10

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Kernel Error After VirtualBox Wakes up

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            <p>Lanka Bell is now Blazing along at 24kbps via satellites. This is a major improvement on what we had less than 12 hours ago when Speedtest.net or any other site simply couldn't be connected to.</p>
            <p><img alt="" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/361979260.png"></p>
            <p>To be fair though, The speed really isn't that slow. It feels a lot faster for things like reading emails etc. I reckon they are using QoS to slow down larger uploads and downloads because they now have only very limited bandwidth what with their sub marine link being out of service. The question is how long does this last?</p>
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Bell WiMax Blazing Speed of 24kbps

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            A week does not pass by without Lanka <a href="2114.html">Bell WiMax suffering a massive breakdown</a>. Late last night the service went down. Different from the usual scenario where you just can't establish a PPPoE connection because the <a href="2062.html">PPP server isn't responding</a>. This time the PPP connection is up but you cannot browse you cannot check mail. Nothing goes past Lankabell BroadBand's <a href="1810.html">pathetically configured router</a>:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="beccd1cafed2d1dddfd2d6d1cdca">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> Packages]# ping google.com
                    PING google.com (209.85.171.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
                    From 10.12.2.114 icmp_seq=10 Destination Host Unreachable
                    From 10.12.2.114 icmp_seq=14 Destination Host Unreachable
                    ^C
                    --- google.com ping statistics ---
                    20 packets transmitted, 0 received, +2 errors, 100% packet loss, time 24068ms</span>

            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="bac8d5d5cefad6d5d9dbd6d2d5c9ce">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> Packages]# traceroute google.com
                    traceroute to google.com (72.14.207.99), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
                    1&nbsp; 10.12.0.17 (10.12.0.17)&nbsp; 36.826 ms&nbsp; 41.930 ms&nbsp; 46.927 ms
                    2&nbsp; 10.12.2.114 (10.12.2.114)&nbsp; 51.688 ms&nbsp; 57.394 ms&nbsp; 57.390 ms
                    3&nbsp; * * *
                    4&nbsp; * * *
                    5&nbsp; * * *
                    6&nbsp; * * *
                    7&nbsp; * * *
                    8&nbsp; * * *
                    9&nbsp; * * *</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Please note that the names are being resolved because I have a caching name server setup locally. Less said about Lanka Bell DNS the better.

            Later we are informed that their submarine link has been damaged. Surely they have a backup? Surely they have satellite links? Well right now I think I am being routed via satellites. Yes service was restored a few hours ago (if you could call it that). It took about two minutes for my wordpress editor page to load.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">PING 67.131.250.72 (67.131.250.72) 56(84) bytes of data.
                    64 bytes from 67.131.250.72: icmp_seq=18 ttl=46 time=1210 ms
                    64 bytes from 67.131.250.72: icmp_seq=19 ttl=46 time=1208 ms
                    64 bytes from 67.131.250.72: icmp_seq=20 ttl=46 time=1202 ms
                    64 bytes from 67.131.250.72: icmp_seq=22 ttl=46 time=1230 ms
                    ^C
                    --- 67.131.250.72 ping statistics ---
                    24 packets transmitted, 4 received, 83% packet loss, time 23138ms
                </span>

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Yet another lanka bell service outage.

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            I have already mentioned that Samba is the network protocol that I settled on for file sharing on my LAN and that Usmb is the userspace file system used for this purpose. Yesterday, I even blogged about howto solve a particular problem you might run into with usmb.

            I settled on usmb after looking at a lot of alternatives including fusesmb. Unlike fusesmb , usmb does not have an RPM for 64bit systems and I had to compile it by hand (all you need to do is type make and make install). You do need to have the headers for samba and fuse present in your system. You can install them as follows:
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;">yum install libsmbclient-devel</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;">yum install fuse-devel</p>

            Then you need to create a ~/.usmb.conf file and then change it's permissions (600) so that only the owner can read the file.

            After doing all that, I am still having no luck. usmb does not produce any output when you execute the command (which is supposed to mean it was successful , yet the remote folder isn't mounted). There is nothing in the log file.

            It was then that I just thought I would do <em>ls /mnt/radmedia/</em> (/mnt/radmedia/ being the mount point I had chosen). Lo and behold, there is a directory listing with the content of my home folder on my media server. Yet <em>df</em> does not show anything being mounted at that mount point! oh well, I can live with that.

            At this point I went back to fusesmb. As with usmb, no error message appears and <em>df</em> actually shows the remote folder as being mounted (the disk usage percentage is also correct). Yet you cannot list the contents of the directory or try to read any of the files on it.

            If that great mathematician Euler was alive today, he would just say use both.

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USMB Howto

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            Anyone would be concerned by an error message like the one above. Not me. I've been there done it and know that it's a not a big issue. if you do a google you will find all kinds of <a href="692.html">lame suggestions</a>. This is really nothing to worry about. The first time I ran into it was nearly four years ago when I accidentally loaded both PHP4 and PHP5 modules into apache. The error was something like
            <a href="000609.html">*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x0811fd30 ***</a>

            This time I was working with a Qemu image that was on a remote machine. An image that was accessed through a samba share. I was playing with some firewall rules while the virtual machine was running and it appeared to get stuck. When I tried to shutdown the VM and relaunch it Qemu told me that it <span style="color: #330000;">'could not open disk image'&nbsp; and ls said: </span>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">ls: cannot open directory .: Transport endpoint is not connected</span></p>

            Then I thought to mount the samba share again with usmb. That's when the error popped up.
            <div style="overflow:auto; margin-top:10px; margin-bottom:25px">
                <pre style="padding-left: 30px; color:#330000">fuse: bad mount point `/mnt/radmedia': Transport endpoint is not connected
*** glibc detected *** usmb: double free or corruption (!prev): 0x00000000008ea1e0 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x3737a78228]
/lib64/libc.so.6(cfree+0x76)[0x3737a7a866]
usmb[0x403925]
usmb[0x402904]
usmb[0x402b78]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfa)[0x3737a1e32a]
usmb[0x401d99]</pre>
            </div>
            <span style="color: #220000;">Immidiately I realized this might be caused by an internal conflict and thought of unmounting the samba share (even though the system told me it's no longer mounted). <em>fusermount -u /mnt/radmedia </em> was all it took to solve this.&nbsp;<em> </em>(/mnt/radmedia being my mount point)<em>. </em>Now the smb share has been remounted and the virtual machine is running once again.</span>

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glibc detected *** usmb: double free or corruption

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            <p>The last time my computer crashed (that is totally froze up) was back in <a href="001386.html">May</a>. Today I have had four freezes with in hours of each other and I am pointing the finger at Fedora 10.</p>
            <p>Twice the machine crashed when it went to sleep. If the computer sleeps, it doesn't wake up again. The screen gets garbled and there is no response to mouse and keyboard entry. Interestingly it can still be pinged. I have temporarily disabled power management to work around this. Power management didn't work perfectly for me in Fedora 9 either but this is just crazy. That means I can't keep the computer running all the time as I usually do but it's not running all the time anyway - crashing all the time is a more apt description.</p>
            <p>The other couple of times the machine crashed it was for no apparent reason at all. On one occasion I was just browsing. There was nothing running that could even remotely be thought of as being demanding of system resources. Yet the machine froze up it would respond to the mouse though. At least you could move the mouse pointer around on but clicking had no effect. During this crash I could actually SSH into this computer from my Macbook. I reckoned this is just X that's crashing and tried to enter runlevel 3. Though the init 3 command was accepted and no error produced the screen didn't even change.</p>
            <p>I tried killing off all processes that looked even remotely like being associated with xorg or Gnome to no avail. The OS refused to respond to anything. Even Windows, inspite of all it's problems isn't really this bad. I am willing to concede that this might be because of faulty installation media (I do have Fedora 10 running without any problems on my File Server). I didn't test the media before installation (who does?) the installer usually bails out when it finds corrupt RPMs (I have seen it happen). I doubt if it's faulty hardware either. This machine is pretty new.</p>
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Four Crashes in a Day

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            <p>Fedora 9 was so bad, I got totally fed up with it and <a href="1425.html">switched to debian</a>. Only to find that Debian is a lot worse. So I <a href="1458.html">switched back to F9</a>. Yesterday, I upgraded to Fedora 10 (that to only after doing a couple of trials with virtual machines). I was hoping that it would be better than F9. It's not. It's a lot worse.</p>
            <p>I have been using linux for around 10 years now and I was a lot happier0 or even 5 years ago than I am now. Each new version is full of so many problems to solve. It's as if Red hat wants to continuously challenge us.&nbsp; it's no wonder that linux has struggled to gain market share. How can ordinary users even hope to have a chance if old hands like me struggle with it?</p>
            <p>Sure I will be able to find solutions for most things with google but there are problems I will have to handle on my own. Not that I can't do it but I don't want to do it. Like everyone else I have more important things to do than fix bugs in other people's programs.</p>
            <p>Why does Red Hat insist on shipping products like PackageKit, Upstart and <a href="001331.html">Pulse Audio</a>? If they just ship that crap on the CD it would be fine but what happens is that good solid stable software are pulled out and they are replaced with the half baked stuff. I don't think any two versions of Fedora had the same sound system - and sound is one of the many things that no longer works for me since upgrading to F10.</p>
            <p></p>

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Why is every version of Fedora worse than the one before?

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            I have mentioned <a href="1740.html">here</a> and <a href="001663.html">there</a> that I am using usmb to mount remote folders. It was only after a little bit of head scratching that I manged to figure it out though. Samba server is one of those things that I never really learned to setup/use. So I decided to take the easy way out and to install the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT). That didn't quite work out.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Connection Interrupted
                    The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
                    The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.</span>
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            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            At first I thought this was an SSL error but it wasn't anything like that. I found the solution in an old mailing list entry made by one Cris Nolan: <a href="https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-August/049448.html">http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-August/049448.html</a>

            SWAT still relies on xinetd, been a long time since I ran into a daemon that does so. Once xinetd was editing usmb could be started easily and mostly it works fine. However if it's left ideling and the computer goes to sleep the connection is dropped. You can easily unmount and mount it again and most things are uneffected but there is an exception. VirtualBox goes crazy when that happens. That's because my virtual machines actualy reside on the remote folder. If the machine goes to sleep <a href="2106.html">VirtualBox</a> just dies off and even completely refuses to start up again. That leaves me wondering if I should go back to <a href="001656.html">ftpfs</a>.

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Samba SWAT

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            My Fedora 10 installation is now booting up with Plymouth.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><object width="425" height="344">
                    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G27F2hBbTTs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1">
                    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
                    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/G27F2hBbTTs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344">
                </object></p>

            It was only after I added the 'vga=0x318' flag (as mentioned at <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes#Boot_up">http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes#Boot_up
            </a> and disabled bootchart that the splash screen appeared.

            The new boot process is supposed to be faster but it doesn't feel like it in fact it feels slightly slower. Without boot chart I will need to revert to a stopwatch to time it. The fact that this installation is the result of a live upgrade rather than a proper upgrade from a DVD might be the cause of it (some of the init scripts etc that the installer might have changed might not have been changed by yum)

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Fedora 10 and Plymouth

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            Just five minutes ago, I did a search and got the same old same old Google UI. Just now I did a search and got something completely different.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/google-vote.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/google-vote-t.jpg" alt="Google new voting system"></a></p>

            What does this mean? has google become a social network. Will spammers now be able to vote legitimate search results out of existence? Will companies with a large number of employees be able to get the number rank simply by asking all their employees to vote for their pages?

            Only time will tell.

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Google SearchWiki new Feature Or WTF?

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            Earlier, I blogged about upgrading from <a href="2121.html">Fedora 9 to 10 with Yum</a>. Then I mentioned that <a href="2160.html">it didn't go too wel</a>l and decided to get a full DVD image with jigdo.&nbsp; Here are some of the things that went wrong with the live update.
            <p style="text-align: center; margin:10px"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/missing-menu.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/missing-menu-t.jpg" alt="missing gnome menu bar"></a></p>

            The Gnome menu bar disappears when ever an applications is started. It's place is taken up by that applications own menu. The running applications title bar also goes on a trip. You cannot resize or drag it. So the only way to get the menu back is to close what's running. It's almost like having a single tasking operating system.

            I later found that <em>metacity --replace</em> can get your menu back but only temporarily. It disappears if you logout or reboot. Then I found that updating metacity manually solves it permanently.

            Firefox doesn't start up at all. When trying to execute from the command line, the following error is reported:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9b5 and 1.9b5</p>

            No surprise that it can't find anything between 1.9b5 and 1.9b5 because there is nothing in between (assuming that version numbers are real numbers and do not have imaginary components in them of course). This issue did go away with the Firefox upgrade. Yet when FF started I was forced to check for Firefox extension updates and to install them because I just couldn't say no! (the buttons were hidden due to the above metacity issue)
            <p style="text-align: center; margin:10px"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/firefox.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/firefox-t.jpg" alt="Firefox without the frame"></a></p>

            One other minor matter was the bootup process stopping at runlevel 3 - the init update had modified the inittab file to set the runlevel to 3. To get the the plymouth splash screen I had to disable bootchart.

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could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9b5 and 1.9b5

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            <p></p>
            <p>The other day, I spoke about <a href="2121.html">upgrading from Fedora 9 to 10 using YUM</a>. The reason that I chose this approach was because I wasn't keen to watch while Azureus or Jigdo painstakingly downloaded the DVD bit by bit. The DVD contains a lot of useful software and it also contains loads of software which I have absolutely no need for.</p>
            <p>Jigdo scores over torrents because it can skip any RPMs that are common to the new version and the old. Of course it would be more civic minded to use a torrent. In my case, I will be installing Fedora on two machines of my own and I will be sharing with quite a few others as well. Mostly these are are people forced to suffer with 512Kb DSL links. Even without using torrents, I am doing my bit to spread the love.</p>
            <p>The reason that I opted for a live update instead of jigdo is because only 7 of the 2800+ files shipped on the DVD are shared between 9 and 10. That means the whole DVD has to be downloaded and even at 2Mbps that would take a bit too long for my liking. The reason that the two versions have so few files in common might be due to the fact that the digital certificates used to sign the RPMs has changed.</p>
            <p>Live updates isn't easy but it's more fun. If you first try it out using a virtual machine, there is no risk of a <a href="001577.html">half cooked upgrade</a> or any data loss. But after doing the live update, I decided to download the ISO and do it the proper way after all. The RPMs downloaded for the live update can be used by Jigdo (it did make use of about 200 of them). That still left more than 2500 files to be downloaded and it was painstakingly slow. Though I have had a <a href="2114.html">spot of bother with my broadband connection</a> of late, this time the slow down is probably because the mirrors are under a heavy strain.</p>
            <p>The initial download was for the 32 bit version - I need it to <a href="1637.html">use the Sun Java Plugin</a> - they still haven't got around to creating a 64 bit version for Linux. How lame is that?. The 32 bit fedora will only run as a guest. When that jigsawed download was reassembled it was time to get the 64 bit version. This time around Jigdo found 1200 rpms from the earlier download that it liked.</p>
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Fedora 10 Live Update vs Jigdo Download.

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            <p></p>
            <p>Once upon a long ago, Rad Inks was an elance service provider. Now I am back at Elance as a buyer. During the 3-4 years that we have been away, elance has really detoriated. Most of the projects that are available now just seem crazy. Everyone seems to want a facebook clone with all the bells and whistles for under USD 500.00 and they want the copyright to the source code too. What's even crazier is that they are people willing to bid for such projects.</p>
            <p>Our own project is to get the <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a> site reorganized. It's been a few years since the last redesign and it's about time we did it. I thought a complete outsider could do a better job by providing a new perspective. So the project was announced and with in 48 hours had attracted more than 20 bids. Most of those bids were crazy. It's almost like people have bots running to place bids for any project that gets listed. Its obvious that many hadn't even fully read the requirement (which was rather brief&nbsp; and eminently readable).</p>
            <p>All those bids were promptly rejected now we are communicating with those that are left over to try to find the good ones from the not so reliable or skilled providers. The trouble is it's darned hard to tell the difference.</p>
            <p></p>

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Elance.

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            I was asking myself if there is a way to mount FTP folders the way you can <a href="2039.html">mount remote folders</a> using SSHFS (or god forbid NFS (No File System)). I first tried 'yum install ftpfs' with no luck. Then I thought to have a look at the <a href="http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.html/FileSystems">fuse supported file systems</a> and quickly found <a href="http://curlftpfs.sourceforge.net/">CurlFTPFs</a>. It hasn't been updated in more than eighteen months but it's still compatible with Fedora 9. Just type yum install curlftpfs

            After downloading about 10 Megabytes of meta info from various repositories, YUM will tell you that there is 34Kb download available! it installs easily and you can mount a remote FTP folder just as easily. By remote I don't actually mean really remote. I mean a machine with in my LAN. You have to be crazy to use FTP over the internet.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">curlftpfs radmedia /mnt/radmedia</p>

            Will mount a folder on my media server at /mnt/radmedia in my desktop - but it only mounts the annoymous FTP folder. telling it to use a specific username and a path doesn't work and the error message is 'couldn't resolve hostname' - which shouldn't be. With SCP and Rsync on the other hand you can specify the username and path easily. Example <a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="e69487828f928e87a69487828b83828f87">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>:/home/raditha/

            Then experimenting further, I found that you can in fact specify a username and a password in the command line. Not quite sure if that's a good idea though. If by some chance someone does hack into one of your machine (hardly likely to happen with linux, but why take a chance?) your second computer will also be compromised because your password is saved in the .bash_history file.

            This is different from the risk of using FTP. Your username and password will be compromised only if someone manages to sniff during the time that you are actuallyl using FTP. If the client is single threaded the window is smaller because the username and password will (usually be sent only once). In contrast if the information can be found in the .bash_history file, it can be read from there at any time.

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FTPFs (Part II)

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            I have never had much need for OCR but when an error popped with VirtualBox the other day and virtual box didn't allow me to share the clipboard from the guest to the host, I thought I would take a screen shot and then OCR the text. It would have been much easier to simply type it but that's not the way geeks do things.

            I learned that there are three popular products, Ocrad, Tesseract ang GOCR. All three can be installed with yum. The first one I tried was GOCR. It produced the following output:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Iease instaII the buiId and header fiIes for your current Linux XerneI
                    he current XerneI version is Z.6.Z5-14.fc9.i686
                    robIems were found which wouId prevent the Guest Additions from instaIIing.
                    Iease correct these probIems and try again.</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Not very accurate is it? (please see the post on <a href="2112.html">Qemu and VirtualBox </a>to for the actual error message). But I am willing to forgive <a href="http://jocr.sourceforge.net/">gocr</a> because that white text on a black background is hard enough for even for humans to read and understand. That console font isn't the easiest font to read either.&nbsp; The next suspect Ocrad simply refused to have anything at all to do with the image.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">ocrad: bad magic number - not a pbm, pgm or ppm file.</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            It didn't fare any better when I saved the file as a pbm (earlier it was a png). It produced exactly nothing. yes nothing, the same thing that you are left with after taxes. So gocr inspite of it's innacuracies is actually doing a pretty decent job.

            Tesseract didn't like the png image and it liked the pbm even less. It wanted a tif file as input. After a lot of huffing and puffing it produced a single byte file as it's output.

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            The last time I tried to use Yum to upgrade from one version of Fedora to another it didn't exactly work out. This time I thought I would try it out first in a virtual machine. If something goes wrong just delete the VM.

            When trying something like this,&nbsp; you should make sure that the keepcache setting in yum.conf is switched on. Otherwise if something goes wrong you will find yourself having to download the hundreds of megabytes of files all over again.

            In my case just typing 'yum upgrade' resulted in a long list of dependency matches and a total suggested download of 1.1 Gb. That's a lot smaller than downloading the whole DVD but I thought I would upgrade just the essentials. In this case the essentials was just xorg.conf (because I want to be able to use the seamless mode in VirtualBox).

            Once the deps were resolved for upgrading xorg, 232 packages need to be downloaded and their total size is 374MB. I wasn't excepting to smooth sailing and it wasn't long before I ran into rough weather.
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"></p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Transaction Check Error:
                    file /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/r128_drv.so from install of xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.8.0-1.fc10.i386 conflicts with file from package xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0-12.fc9.i386
                    file /usr/share/man/man4/r128.4.gz from install of xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.8.0-1.fc10.i386 conflicts with file from package xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0-12.fc9.i386
                    file /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt from install of ca-certificates-2008-7.noarch conflicts with file from package openssl-0.9.8g-6.fc9.i686
                    file /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/mach64_drv.so from install of xorg-x11-drv-mach64-6.8.0-1.fc10.i386 conflicts with file from package xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0-12.fc9.i386</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Usually when faced with problems like this, my approach is to simply remove the offending rpms (keeping my fingers crossed of course). I was reluctant to remove the openssl RPM is more than likely to break yum. So I just removed the others and asked yum to have another go. Obviously this is where using the keepcache option comes in handy. Real handy.

            When I ran yum again it wanted to download another 26MB. In for a penny , in for a pound. Even then the update still failed because of the conflict with openssl. I reluctantly decided to update openssl before continuing. There are countless programs and libraries linked to openssl the chances are very high&nbsp; that 'yum update openssl' will lead to&nbsp; vicious cycle of dependency resolution with the end result of a total download that is as big as what you would see with just plain 'yum upgrade'

            Fortunately that didn't happen. Only three packages were updated as a result of the 'yum update openssl' command. Then in once again typed 'yum groupupdate "X Window System"'&nbsp;and this time the transactions started without any time being spent on downloads.

            During the transaction another error appeared on the screen (but yum didn't bail out because of it)
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">/sbin/new-kernel-pkg: line 287: /sbin/depmod: Permission denied
                    /sbin/mkinitrd: line 1677: /sbin/depmod: Permission denied
                    "/sbin/depmod -a 2.6.27.5-109.fc10.i686" failed.
                    mkinitrd failed</span>

                So I thought to run<em> /sbin/depmod -a 2.6.27.5-109.fc10.i686 </em>manually and to keep my fingers crossed and hope there wouldn't be any boot up problems.<em> </em>Further on , yum did run into what appears to be a more serious error.
            </p>
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 100px;">ERROR:dbus.connection:Unable to set arguments () according to signature u's': &lt;type 'exceptions.TypeError'&gt;: More items found in D-Bus signature than in Python arguments
                Traceback (most recent call last):
                File "/usr/sbin/yum-complete-transaction", line 198, in &lt;module&gt;
                util = YumCompleteTransaction()
                File "/usr/sbin/yum-complete-transaction", line 114, in __init__
                self.main()
                File "/usr/sbin/yum-complete-transaction", line 184, in main
                if self.doTransaction() == 0:
                File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 464, in doTransaction
                resultobject = self.runTransaction(cb=cb)
                File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 846, in runTransaction
                self.plugins.run('posttrans')
                File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/plugins.py", line 176, in run
                func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
                File "/usr/lib/yum-plugins/refresh-packagekit.py", line 37, in posttrans_hook
                packagekit_iface.StateHasChanged('posttrans')
                File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 68, in __call__
                return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords)
                File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 140, in __call__
                **keywords)
                File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 597, in call_blocking
                message.append(signature=signature, *args)
                TypeError: More items found in D-Bus signature than in Python arguments</div>
            But that occurred in the cleanup stage. There were 443 items in the transaction (including installs, updates and removes). The above error occurred after the 443rd item. So now I am not sure if the system has been succesfully updated (the error can be ignore) or the update has failed. Well I found out that the update had failed when I tried to reboot - the new kernel didn't show up in the grub boot menu.
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"></p>

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Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 (with Yum)

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            While trying out VirtualBox I wanted to use the existing Qemu images to save me the trouble of having to carry out new guest OS installations. Sadly, qmeu images will not work out of the box with VirtualBox. Though it's not possible to directly convert them to VirtualBox (vdi) images with Qemu, can convert them to VMDK.

            VMDK is the format used by VMware. It is compatible with VirtualBox as well as Qemu. So you have the option of using either VirtualBox or Qemu to start up a virtual machine. Starting up VirtualBox however, wasn't smooth sailing all the way. First, i was forced to remove the kvm_intel and kvm kernel modules because of this error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot.
                    VBox status code: -4011 (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).</span>

                Even after the modules were removed (rmmod), the boot up process didn't run to completion. My default runlevel is 5 - but X wasn't started. It was because the VGA card emulated by Qemu is very different from the one emulated VirtualBox. I reckoned I will have to install the 'VirtualBox guest additions' to have the proper vga driver. That also choked with an error.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Please install the build and header files for your current Linux Kernel
                    The current Kernel version is 2.6.Z5-14.fc9.i686
                    Problems were found which would prevent the Guest Additions from installing.
                    Please correct these problems and try again.</span>

                After installing the kernel-devel package I managed to install the add-ins but my xserver still refused to start. So I just deleted the xorg.conf file and hoped the system would get by&nbsp; with the default - it did. And finally the graphical login screen appeared - with an atrociously high resolution (fixed through System-&gt;Preferences).

                I have yet to suceeded in enabling the 'seamless mode'. Apparently the xorg version shipped with Fedora 9 isn't fully supported. Now to try an upgrade to Fedora 10.

                One aspect in which VirtualBox scores over Qemu is speed it appears to be slightly faster. The <a href="2042.html">boot time</a> is 39 seconds whereas Qemu takes 44 seconds.

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From Qemu to VirtualBox?

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            After having a spot of bother with <a href="http://bellard.org/qemu/">Qemu</a> and on the recommendation of a fellow geek, I considered switching to Virtual box.

            The 64 bit version of <a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</a> is labeled as being for AMD processors. Therefore I opted for the 32 bit version. When I tried to install it with 'yum localinstall VirtualBox-2.0.4_38406_fedora9-1.i386.rpm' ,&nbsp; yum wanted to get another 78MB of downloads. They were mostly 32 bit libraries for this and that. I wasn't keen to have such a mix and match. I have already burnt my fingers one by <a href="001577.html">mixing 32 bit and 64 libraries.</a>

            At this point, I decided , heck with the AMD label and downloaded the 64 bit version. However Yum refused to it install it.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #330000;">Package VirtualBox-2.0.4_38406_fedora9-1.x86_64.rpm is not signed</span></p>

            That reluctance has nothing to do with processor incompatibilities but simply because it wasn't signed. The 64 bit RPM didn't have any dependencies so I could by itnore yum and install it using rpm the old fashioned way. Even then it wasn't without difficulty
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox'
                    chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSDL'
                    chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless'
                    chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxwebsrv'</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Creating group 'vboxusers'. VM users must be member of that group!</span></p>

            With these being warnings and not errors (caused by SELinux being disabled apparently. What sane man uses SElinux?), I reckoned that I should be able to carry on. Well not exactly. After launching Applications-&gt;System Tools-&gt;Sun xVM VirtualBox it failed on the registration step. It's rarely that open source software has to be registered but Sun is a pretty weird company. And their weird registration dialog wouldn't go away. So I killed it.

            Rather than going through the process of creating yet another guest OS installation, I thought of trying to import one of the existing Qemu images. VirtualBox didn't like it. Bit strage really since the 'about us' says that Virtualbox uses components from Qemu. Documentation at first glance appears to be a bit sparse (no man page). What they have is a CHM help system. That didn't help me to figure out how to import a Qemu image. I learnt it by looking at the image types supported by both virtualization system and using qemu-img to do the conversion.

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VirtualBox.

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            <p></p>
            <p>Recently, I installed DSL - Damned Small Linux on as a guest operating system under Qemu and found that the mouse and the keyboard wouldn't respond after the boot up process had been completed. At the time I concluded that it is a quirk in DSL and gave up on it.</p>
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            <p></p>

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Qemu and Lost Mouse Pointers

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            <p>Been waiting for a long time for PHP support to be added into Netbeans. Decided that I can wait no longer and downloaded the nightly build. And what can I say, I just love it.</p>
            <p>Netbeans can be used with Xdebug to debug PHP scripts. I know that xdebug can be used with eclipse too but I have never quite aquired a taste for eclipse. Of course which IDE is better is largely a matter of religious preference but in my humble opion the best IDE is Nebeans.</p>
            <p>I am no longer a heavy PHP coder, so I use whatever editor that comes to mind when I actually do write in PHP - many of them don't even have debug support. But Netbeans is something that is almost always on my desktop so this means I can do both PHP and Java on the same IDE.</p>
            <p>Footnote: install xdebug with <em>yum install php-pecl-xdebug</em></p>
            <p></p>

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Netbeans 6.5 and PHP

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            <p>Lanka Bell is really outdoing itself. The connection was dropped just after midnight (so says <a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/timeout.txt.gz">syslog</a>). Fortunately I went to sleep at 11.00PM. Like most geeks the first thing I do in the morning is find out how many junk mails I have recieved overnight, couldn't do that of course because the service was out. I waited till the sun was really shining and messages my Friend Ishara at Lanka Bell he put it right again with in a matter of minutes. But that's not the point - their connection should be dropping off so often.</p>
            <p>One Wednesday morning <a href="2062.html">the connection had dropped</a>. It was restored briefly but was lost again in the afternoon and remained that way till thursday afternoon. <a href="2069.html">A full day service outage</a>. and just barely 36 hours later it had dropped off again.</p>
            <p>The very reason that I switched from Dialog Broadband to Lanka Bell was because I wanted to avoid this kind of thing. But now bell wimax appears to be worst than Dialog's. And when you really think about it SLT that poor excuse for an IT company really is better than both of them.</p>
            <p></p>

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And More Lanka Bell Service Disruptions

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            <p>In my opinion overclocking is just a waste of time and a sure way of reducing the life time of your CPU and possibly even your VGA card and RAM. The real bottleneck in modern computers is the <a href="1928.html">hard drive</a> and RAM. Memory is so cheap now it's crazy&nbsp; to spend a load of money on a more expensive processor when you can give your system a real boost by adding another gigabyte of memory at a fraction of the cost.</p>
            <p>So If I don't believe in overclocking why did I just overclock my own machine just now? Well&nbsp; I often run virtual machines using QEMU. My E6400 Core 2 Duo processor has the vmx flag, so that means the guest operating system runs <em>almost </em>as fast as it would run natively. I have been playing around with boot times as well and found that a&nbsp; <a href="1720.html">Fedora 9 i386 guest boots up in 44 seconds</a> (using bootchart).</p>
            <p>I wondered if I could improve the speed of the guest by overclocking the host CPU. I was disappointed. The boot up time actually increased by 10 seconds! You can't of course rely on a single measurement because processes running on the host system take a slice of the CPU and also compete to read and write from memory and the hard drives. So I ran the test again. The second time around, the boot up process clocked in at 50 seconds.</p>
            <p>I can only guess that the increase in core temperature caused by the overclocking, results in the less overall efficiency.&nbsp; You would say, I should download one of those number crunching benchmark suites out there and see what figures they produce but those results would be completely irrelevant. I don't do number crunching. The most processor intensive task that I do is running qemu. If Qemu doesn't get faster with an overclocked CPU it's no use to me.</p>
            <p>Running Netbeans and building java applets and applications is also heavy on the processor but then, it's heavy on the hard drive and the RAM as well. It's hard to measure performance improvements with these task but it doesn't feel any faster with a souped up processor.</p>
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Boot Up Time and Overclocking.

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            <p>Just a few minutes after I posted a message <a href="2062.html">yesterday</a> about my Lanka Bell Broadband connection dying off (and being restored). It died off again. It has remained dead all this time. I had to connect with my pathetically slow dialog 3g connection to make this post.</p>
            <p>The first thing I did today was to phone up my contact and lankabell, he promised to look into it. He in fact called me back twice to keep me posted but despite his best efforts, the link continues to remain dead.</p>
            <p>This is just the sort of thing I hoped to avoid by <a href="1452.html">switching from Dialog Broadband to Lanka Bell</a>. This sort of disruption was the order of the day with DBN.</p>
            <p>When Airtel eventually gets here and starts offering broadband services. I will definitely be <a href="1829.html">standing in line</a>.</p>
            <p></p>

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No internet for a whole day.

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            Lankabell broadband is going downhill. Pretty soon they will be worse than dialog broadband. Come to think of it they probably already are. DBN in recent weeks have made significant improvements to their service (more on that later). As for Lanka Bell, I was without internet access for a&nbsp; few hours thanks to my Lanka Bell Wimax connection getting disrupted.
            <div style="overflow: auto; margin-left: 20px; height: 50px;">
                <pre>Nov 12 13:09:56 localhost pppoe-connect: PPPoE connection lost; attempting re-connection.
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: Connect: ppp0 &lt;--&gt; /dev/pts/1
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: Connection terminated.
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: Modem hangup
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppoe[11309]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppd[11306]: Exit.
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppoe-connect: PPPoE connection lost; attempting re-connection.
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: Connect: ppp0 &lt;--&gt; /dev/pts/1
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: Connection terminated.
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: Modem hangup</pre>
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            Usually whenever there is a disruption, I call up my contact at&nbsp; Lanka bell and he would usually put it right in a matter of minutes. Today being a public holiday, I didn' want to bother him so I decided to go through the normal channels. First I had to get online to find the customer support number. For that I had to rely on Dialog 3g. Except that Dialog 3G doesn't work in my house. If I really want 3g, I need to go upto the roof. So I crawled along with an edge connetion and managed to get to the bell corporate site only to see an error on the contact us page.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/bell-errors.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/bell-errors-t.jpg" alt="Trying to contact Sri Lanka wimax company"></a></p>

            The page for broadband has a number listed on it which I called and eventually managed to get through to a loser in the support department. If you have a really low IQ you stand a good chance of joining the Sri Lanka Police or the support staff at Lanka Bell, Dialog, SLT or any bank. The lady who answered my call didn't disapoint me (since I didn't expect to be able to find a solution). She wanted the business registration number (this is a corporate account) which I didn't have it , this is a holiday. She promised to try to help anyway and put me on hold for five minutes (I was lucky, usually they forget you). She got back to me saying she is unable to help without all relevent information.

            One wonders why databases were invented. But I am willing to bet that Lankabell as well as Dialog and SLT don't even have databases. Their top brass probably think Oracle is a character in the movie Matrix (those who have watched it that is). They would stare at you blankly if you mention mysql.

            So I was contemplating life without broadband for at least another2 hours and went to have lunch and to play with the kids. Fortunately a few hours later they did restore the service. They have forgotten to restore their site though. In fact now the entire site is inaccessible. The tragedy for Sri Lanka is that we have ISP who cannot even keep their own websites running.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/lankabell.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/lankabell-t.jpg" alt="Sri Lanka Broad Band Service Provider"></a></p>

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Lanka Bell times out again.

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            <p>Looking at the boot up time of my Fedora 9 Desktop, I found it to be a rather <a href="1715.html">disappointing 59 seconds</a>. I managed to reduce that somewhat by optimizing the firewall startup script and killing off a few services that I don't like don't want.</p>
            <p>Optimizing boot up time is a tedious process and I hate to reboot my machine anyway. So I thought, i would try it with Qemu. After creating a Qemu guest (I chose Fedora 9 - i386 for this because I want to be able to run applets on it) I installed <a href="http://www.bootchart.org/">bootchart</a>. Boot chart is a nice piece of software that logs the boot up process and from that log file you can create&nbsp; Gannt chart.</p>
            <p>The Qemu guest operating system resides on my <a href="1330.html">File server</a>. That machine has an E2180 processor at 2.0 GHz. The E2180 doesn't have the vmx flag set, so not surprisingly boot up time was slow. Very slow in fact a whopping 4:43 !</p>
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            <p></p>

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Improving Fedora boot up time

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            When I get too many visitors to my website, my ego get's effected. One way to cure it is to identify known bots and spammers and to stop counting page views attributable to those spammers. As a result the total number of pages per day as reported by the log analysis tools decreases and that in turn leads to a dramatic reduction in the ego.

            Here are the latest additions to the exclude list (in analog.cfg):
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">HOSTEXCLUDE 218.103.176.25
                HOSTEXCLUDE 74.50.117.78
                HOSTEXCLUDE 74.50.117.96
                HOSTEXCLUDE 69.46.23.155
                HOSTEXCLUDE 194.165.42.137
                HOSTEXCLUDE 60.255.140.28
                HOSTEXCLUDE 198.24.6.168

                The first four spambots in this list accounted for more than 50,000 page views per week. iptables has also been updated to drop any requests from these IPS (why waste bandwidth?). Despite filtering out these requests the large differece between the number of ads served by adsense and the number of pages reported by analog remains high.

                By the way, you can find out if an IP you suspect as belonging to a spammer really does belong to a one by entering it in the IP lookup table at <a href="https://www.projecthoneypot.org/">Project Honey Pot.</a>. Another place where you get a similar sort of service is <a href="http://www.stopforumspam.com/">Stop Forum Spam</a>

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Treatment for ego problems

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            <p>Since my house is wired for gigabit Ethernet with cat 6 cable at great cost, it seems a crime to use rsync/SFTP/SCP for file transfers with in the LAN, they both operate rather slowly in comparison to plain unsecured file transfer protocols like FTP. It never ceases to amaze me how ever experienced web masters do no realize how insecure FTP really is. No doubt they are mislead by names like 'Very Secure FTP server". They are anything but.</p>
            <p><em>No File System</em> (NFS) is not something that I want to use either. If FTP is insecure, this is worse, you don't even need a username and password for NFS. And some people even call this the Network File System.</p>
            <p>Having said all that, it wouldn't really matter that about the security because all this happens inside my LAN. If someone is able to snoop in on&nbsp; packets in my LAN, I am in deep trouble anyway. In fact that did almost happen a month or two ago, but more on it later.</p>
            <p>When you forget the security concerns, NFS doesn't seem such a bad option. But you still need to cope with&nbsp; UIDs getting mixed up and the associated mess. FTP doesn't have that problem but it's much harder to use than SCP or rsync. One option would be to mount a remote FTP folder so that it shows up like a local folder like you can with SSHFS.</p>
            <p>One simple solution is to connect to the FTP server using nautilus. Then the remote file system is automatically mounted under ~/.gvfs by Gnome Virtual File System , but then you need to use a 'gvfs aware' program to access the files and folder under that mount point. Many existings scripts and programs (example <em>cat, cp ) </em>cannot handle those files.</p>
            <p></p>

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            <p>Last year, I was so <a href="1136.html">disapointed with Adsense</a> that I thought of moving away from it and did. <a href="1156.html">I ended up with Adbrite</a>. It's like falling out of the frying pan into the fire.</p>
            <p>Adsense targetting leaves much to be desired and click through rates are abisimal. On top of that there is a huge difference between the number of pages served (as reported by analog and other tools) and the number of banner impressions.</p>
            <p>I joined adbrite to find that it's a poor second best in all these aspects. To make matters worse, some of the ads definitely are sleazy. Not the kind of wares that I wanted promoted on my site. Even so I let things be for quire a while primarily out of laziness but in the end decided enough is enough. Almost all the adbrite ads have been pulled up. There is still a few left in the wiki section of this site. The wiki itself needs serious attention because it's been spammed to death.</p>
            <p>During the time that I was on adbrite <a href="1659.html">things haven't improved</a> all that much with adsense.</p>
            <p></p>

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Good Bye Adbrite

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            <p>It's been a long long time since I last created an NTFS partition.&nbsp; Just created one - but windows is no where in site. The partition was created with cfdisk as usually and formatted with mkfs.ntfs - how easy things have become. I remember struggling a long time ago to mount NTFS partitions while using Redhat. The Redhat kernel didn't support NTFS and you had to compile it by hand, even then it was read only and sometime prone to error.</p>
            <p>We have come a long way since then. Even so I was a wee bit worried about using NTFS (specially since I often fall victim to hard drive failures). So instead of partitioning a real drive I used a disk image. mkfs.ntfs was run inside a Qemu guest.</p>
            <p>The disk on that particular guest (Fedora 9) was used up. Fedora says 4 GB is all that is needed for the install, well even without installing KDE, i have only about 300MB left on it. Had I installed KDE also , the full 4GB would have been used up. Increasing the size of a new partition is a tedious process. So I thought I would add a second disk (virtual of course) and move usr onto it. Heck I must be the only guy in the world to have his /usr on an NTFS partition.</p>
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            <p>First time I used virtualization was long long ago when I was in fact on windows and booted linux inside it. Then I switched completely over to linux and had trouble doing the reverse - running windows inside linux. Sure wine was around at that time but it's not exactly a virtualization system and it could only run windows 95/98 applications reliably. Then I laid off the subject for many years until I ran into <a href="721.html">Qemu</a> and <a href="579.html">PearPC</a> about four years ago.</p>
            <p><img align="center" alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f9/virtual-system.jpg" style="margin-top:20px; margin-bottom:20px"></p>
            <p>Since then I managed to install many different flavours of linux and other operating systems through Qemu and generally managed to make use of the installer DVD/CD for the setup. Qemu has come a long way since then and now ships on the Fedora DVD - which has a sophisticated virtualization management system. Well looks sophisticated but it's lame - you can't use your installation media to set up a guest system.&nbsp; You need to install over the network.</p>
            <p>I've come so far in fact with out <a href="1803.html">using the xen kernel</a> - the system wouldn't boot with it.</p>
            <p></p>

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Fedora Lame Virtualization?

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            I just found out that&nbsp; 'mount -t smbfs' no longer works with Fedora. Turns out that it has been deprecated for a long long time. If you try it you will get nothing more than an error.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            I read in a few places that you could use 'mount -t cifs' instead. Didn't see why that should work but tried it anyway and as expected it didn't work.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">retrying with upper case share name
                    mount error 6 = No such device or address
                    Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Fortunately there is more than one way to skin a cat and fuse is what I turned to. Gone are the days when you had to rely on kernel support to mount different file system types. Nowadays with fuse, you can mount all kinds of things with userland tools.

            So I checked the fuse listings to see what's on offer. There are three packages that provide SMB support. As a geek , I am supposed to be lazy, so I picked the one that can be installed with YUM; which is <a href="http://www.ricardis.tudelft.nl/~vincent/fusesmb/">fusesmb</a>. Laziness doesn't always pay. You need to create a ~/.smb/fusesmb.conf file before you can start using it and you need to read the man pages before you can figure out what goes into it (yeah RTFM, obviously). And then you need to change the permissions on that file to 600 or fusesmb refuses to run.

            Unfortunately creating the fusesmb.conf file and changing the permissions made no difference because fusesmb still refuses to run. It produces the following error and a sense of <a href="1438.html">deja vu</a>:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied</span></p>

            I can still mount a folder as root, but the folder it mounted wasn't the folder that expected to be mounted, it was a shared folder that was empty. Unlike other fuse packages you cannot type in the path to the server at the command line. For example in SSHFS I can type the following command
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">sshfs <a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="740615101d001c15340615101911101d15">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>:/home/raditha/ /mnt/radmedia/</p>

            And fuse will mount exactly the folder that I tell it to. Getting back to the error, you can over come that by doing a chmod (as root)
            <pre class="tightenable top" style="padding-left: 30px;">chmod o+rw /dev/fuse</pre>
            Then you will get another error about permission to execute fusermount. You can solve that by adding yourself to the fuse group. You will need to logout and login again though for the change to take effect. Of course in X, just closing the terminal and opening a new one is usually enough.

            Now to figure out how to make this thing (fusesmb) mount the folder that I want it to mount instead of what it wants to mount

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            I just found out that&nbsp; 'mount -t smbfs' no longer works with Fedora. Turns out that it has been deprecated for a long long time. If you try it you will get nothing more than an error.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            I read in a few places that you could use 'mount -t cifs' instead. Didn't see why that should work but tried it anyway and as expected it didn't work.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">retrying with upper case share name
                    mount error 6 = No such device or address
                    Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Fortunately there is more than one way to skin a cat and fuse is what I turned to. Gone are the days when you had to rely on kernel support to mount different file system types. Nowadays with fuse, you can mount all kinds of things with userland tools.

            So I checked the fuse listings to see what's on offer. There are three packages that provide SMB support. As a geek , I am supposed to be lazy, so I picked the one that can be installed with YUM; which is <a href="http://www.ricardis.tudelft.nl/~vincent/fusesmb/">fusesmb</a>. Laziness doesn't always pay. You need to create a ~/.smb/fusesmb.conf file before you can start using it and you need to read the man pages before you can figure out what goes into it (yeah RTFM, obviously). And then you need to change the permissions on that file to 600 or fusesmb refuses to run.

            Unfortunately creating the fusesmb.conf file and changing the permissions made no difference because fusesmb still refuses to run. It produces the following error and a sense of <a href="1438.html">deja vu</a>:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied</span></p>

            I can still mount a folder as root, but the folder it mounted wasn't the folder that expected to be mounted, it was a shared folder that was empty. Unlike other fuse packages you cannot type in the path to the server at the command line. For example in SSHFS I can type the following command
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">sshfs <a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="453724212c2d24053724212820212c24">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>:/home/raditha/ /mnt/radmedia/</p>

            And fuse will mount exactly the folder that I tell it to. Getting back to the error, you can over come that by doing a chmod (as root)
            <pre class="tightenable top" style="padding-left: 30px;">chmod o+rw /dev/fuse</pre>
            Then you will get another error about permission to execute fusermount. You can solve that by adding yourself to the fuse group. You will need to logout and login again though for the change to take effect. Of course in X, just closing the terminal and opening a new one is usually enough.

            Now to figure out how to make this thing (fusesmb) mount the folder that I want it to mount instead of what it wants to mount

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            <p>Couple of months ago, I wrote about JoPPP -<a href="1457.html"> Junk over PPP</a>. That is seeing a lot of packets on my external interace that shouldn't be there. This interface is connected to my Lanka Bell Wimax antenna. They did fix the issue shortly after I reported it the last time but unfortunately it resurfaced.</p>
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            <p></p>

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Misdirected Packets

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            <p>I didn't have an <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">assbook</span> facebook account until very recently and didn't have a Hi5 account either (I did sign up when they started using <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> Never bothered to try out any of the other social networking sites like myspace and wild horses would have to drag me over hot coals before I signed up for live. But I did just sign up for a <a href="https://twitter.com/e4c5">twitter account</a> as well as a plurk account. Still trying to figure out what use they are.</p>
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Twitter and Plurk.

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            <p>I have always believed that whether a computer is fast or slow depends primarily on how much RAM you have and how fast your hard drive is. Processing power is secondary. Of course that does not apply if you are heavily into number crunching or a hard code gamer. Even a gamer might find that having a faster GPU is much better than having a faster CPU.</p>
            <p>I have often wondered if SATA II is really any better than SATA I or even IDE drives. So I <a href="../../linux/drive-speed.php">did a comparision test</a> to find out. It took just minutes really. The conclusion is that they are all pretty much the same.</p>
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Is SATA II really any better than an IDE Drive

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            <p>So is this language a Python or a Ratsnake? Actually Rat snakes are very harmless species of non venomous snakes. As the name suggests they eat rats and mice so if you see one slithering into your house you shouldn't chase it away. They are always welcome into mine. I spotted one in the store room about a month back.</p>
            <p>As for python, it doesn't even have block quotes! Well people tell me that I don't need block quotes, and unlike ratsnakes, blockquotes are poison. Since Pythons aren't venomous the don't go together. That makes Python similar to Fortran and perl. Perl has other useful features not present in python, like the <em>here document</em>. But when you look closer you find that triple quotes can be used as a substitute. I know python fans will fall on my like a bunch of Anacondas for <a href="1611.html">comparing python with Fortran</a>. They seem to hate it.</p>
            <p>One great advantage of PHP is that is dynamical typed which means a great disadvantage of PHP and of Python is that they are both dynamically typed (no I am not contradicting myself it's great when things go right, a huge pain when things go wrong). PHP has several functions to sort out the types mess but sometimes they give strange results.</p>
            <p>I have seen programming language quizzes where they give you an expression with mixed types and ask you what the result is going to be. How stupid is that? No self respecting programmer is going to bother to figure out such code in his head.</p>
            <p>I digress. The whole point of this was because of the trouble I was having finding the equivalent of print_r or var_dump of PHP in python. It was after some searching that I found it on a <a href="http://www.wooblelab.com/command/show/127">wierdly named site</a> the function is repr. Who ever came up with that name?</p>
            <p>I had more difficulty in finding the size of an uploaded file - sure, I know how to get the size after the file has been saved - but I need to know the size before saving - so far, the documentation hasn't thrown up anything. Sure you can get the size indirectly by us calling len() on the file data but it seems such a waste.</p>
            <p></p>

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Python or Ratsnake?

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            <p>I first ran Into <a href="http://www.phprojekt.com/">PHProjekt</a> around 8-9 years ago when I myself was working for a groupware and messaging solution provider. At the time PHProjekt to put it rather bluntly, was half baked. We had our own project management software and it was worse. When the plug was finally pulled on it, no one mourned it's demise.</p>
            <p>PHPProjekt on the other hand has survived and has seen the release of many new versions. While so much of features have been added it hasn't become any easier to use. Memories have faded but I think it's actually a lot harder to use now than it was then.</p>
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PHProjekt

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            <p>When I first <a href="36.html">started blogging</a> more than 4 years ago, it was with blogger.com, Then I looked at a few other tools and finally settled on Movable Type. I don't remember if any of them had support for tags. Later versions of Movable Type that I upgraded to certainly did have this feature, but I never made use of it. Then recently I gave up on MT and became a <a href="1667.html">happy Wordpress user.</a></p>
            <p>WP certainly has tagging and I am making full use of it. I even decided to add tags to the older posts. Every time I login to wordpress I tag a few of the old untagged entries. Upto now, I&nbsp; have manged to go only as far back as March this year, so there is a long long way to go.</p>
            <p>With the bunch that has been tagged already, the most widely used tag during that period is&nbsp; <a href="https://www.raditha.com/blog/archives/tag/broadband">Broad Band</a>. It just goes to shwo that there is always something to talk about Sri Lankan ISPs and much of it is negative feedback. No wonder we are still a third world country.</p>
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Rretro Tagging ?

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            Suppose you have&nbsp; directory tree o and you want to copy all the files in that directory tree into another, how do you do that? well there are lots of solutions, including 'cp -a' and 'rsync -a'.

            But what if you want to copy only the files, you don't want the directories? In other words you want to collapse (squash) the directory structure. That's also easy enough. As an example suppose you wanted to copy all the downloaded rpm files into a single location so that you can set up a local repository or burn it to a DVD.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">find /var/cache/yum/ -name&nbsp; '*rpm' -exec cp '{}' '.' ';'</p>

            This command copy all the contents of all the sub folders in the source into one single target directory.

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Recursive file copy - with out the tree

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            I Thought, I would try my hand at XML parsing with the python DOM. Whatever programming llanguage you use the DOM pretty much the the same. However things didn't get off to an auspicious start. Even the sample code on the python docs didn't work and produced an error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Traceback (most recent call last):
                    File "/var/www/clients/work/python/xml.py", line 3, in &lt;module&gt;
                    from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
                    File "/var/www/clients/work/python/xml.py", line 3, in &lt;module&gt;
                    from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
                    ImportError: No module named dom.minidom</span></p>
            Then I saw a suggestion saying try <em>from xml.dom.minidom import *</em> . I didn't see how that will work but gave it a try anyway with no luck. I next checked to see if I have <em>libxml2-python</em> I thought to update it and python to see if it will solve it - it didn't.

            Next I tried the interpreter (just invoking python from the command line) and cutting and pasting the code there - whoa that works! Next I tried `cat xml.py | python` and lo and behold that works too. Then I noticed that a file named xml.pyc is being created by the interpreter and being left behind. I suspected that the filename or the way the interpreter is being executed might have something to do with.

            <a href="http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1715772&amp;postcount=3">A post by one Matt Mower</a> confirmed my fears: <em>The python script being named as xml.py causes the intepreter to get confused</em>. It's conflicting with the python module named xml (in java we call these packages) in the library. <em>Renaming the file as my_domxml.py and deleting the xml.pyc did the trick</em>. Note that if you just rename the file it's not going to work the .pyc file will continue to cause trouble.

            So I guess whenever I see an <em>ImportError: No module named xxx</em> I should immidiately check my choice of filename.

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ImportError: No module named dom.minidom

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            <p>Well, thankfully the speed of my Lanka Bell Broad Band connection is now back to normal. I don't think I will need to switch to airtel after all.</p>
            <p><img alt="" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/347750985.png"></p>
            <p>The difference between other providers and bell is that their service is pretty consistent. Both SLT and Dialog Broadband have massive slowdowns between 5-7 in the evening and 8-9 in the morning. Bell on the other hand has the same speed even at that time. They make up for it by having this occasional <a href="1810.html">weird crawl</a> like we just had.</p>
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Normal Service Restored

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            <p>Can't wait for Airtel to start their operations. I am getting quite annoyed with Lankabell broadband. It's now 24 hours since their service went down. Then their restored it nearly 12 hours later. But the speed is <a href="1810.html">only 3%</a> of what it ought to be.</p>
            <p>So what does one do?</p>
            <p>SLT is pathetic and Dialog Broadband is worse. I was very happy with bell till this happened. Airtel judging by the numerous delays they have had in getting off the ground will be no better. But hope springs internal ..... and all that.</p>
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When does airtel get here?

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            <p>My downlink of my lankabell broadband connection has suddenly become slower than dialup. This is the kind of speed that I used to see many many years ago when using a 56kbps dialup modem.</p>
            <p><img alt="" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/347262326.png"></p>
            <p><img alt="" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/347264541.png"></p>
            <p>So far <a href="1470.html">their speeds have been very good</a>. And their service far far more reliable than Dialog or SLT. But two days ago their connections started dropping randomly and I was without internet from around 7:00pm last night till about 9:30 am this morning. Since then service has been restored but the speeds drops off like this.</p>
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Who pulled the handbrake?

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            <p>The other day, I changed the permalinks structure in my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com">photo blog</a>. I wasn't getting a lot of traffic&nbsp; there, so I wasn't too worried about things going wrong. Well, they did go wrong. I used dean's permalink migration plugin (because it was the one recommended in a couple of articles I read on the topic)&nbsp; to redirect the old links to the new ones. The plugin worked marvelously well for individual entries, but it couldn't handle the monthly archives and I had to <a href="1629.html">modify the .htaccess</a> file to include a couple of rewrite rules to redirect those links manually.</p>
            <p>For this blog, I don't want the old entries to be redirected at all. The old links should remain the way they are (numeric) and the new ones should have the title in the link. That's because many old posts are ranked high in google. Changing their URLs might result in them dropping off.</p>
            <p>At first I thought of writing my own plug-in oto achieve this but a good geek doesn't write anything if he can avoid it. So I looked around again and found the <a href="http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/advanced-permalinks/">advanced permalinks</a> migration plugin which at first sight seemed to do the job just right.</p>
            <p>On closer inspection I found that the category archives broke the moment the plugin was enabled. Great pity because it has just the features that I am looking for and the author seems to have put in a lot of effort for it. However it's said to be compatible with wordpress version 2.50 or older and the current version is 2.63. So there you are, it doesn't always pay to be lazy.</p>
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Trying to Find a Fool Proof Way of Changing Permalinks

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            <p style="text-align: left;">I tried to setup Xen virtualization on my media server and ended up with a messed up boot loader. There isn't a Fedora 9 xen installation guide, so I followed the instructions for Fedora 8. Part of those instructions include setting up the Xen kernel. So I did that and it updated my grub.conf file. Next I edited the config file to make the xen kernel is the new default kernel and after that I reluctantly rebooted.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">After rebooting, I waited for the machine to come back up but it didn't, when I finaly walked over to it, the scree just had 'grub' on it and showed no inclination of changing. Yikes, I had forgotten to run grub-install. So it was time to boot up in rescue mode and try to update the boot sector. Unfortunately I kept running into the following error on grub-install</p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">/dev/sdc2 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">I rebooted anyway and this time was rewarded with the grub console. That meant I could boot up the machine by manually entering the settings for kernerl, initrd etc. Once the machine is properly booted up, I reckoned I would be able to solve the problem easy.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">What had once been /dev/sda had suddenly become /dev/sdc (I am so glad that UUIDs are now being used in the /etc/fstab instead of device names). This bit of information didn't get me very far either. Fortunately I came across a post from one <a href="https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-grub@gnu.org/msg10233.html">Adrian 15</a> which explained what needs to be done; you need to edit devices.map on /boot/grub/</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">After making the change the file server does boot up normally but <em>not</em> with the xen kernel! So qemu is still the only choice available. It's not a bad choice actually.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"></p>

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Lame Virtualization messes up grub.

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            <p>I find myself being <a href="1380.html">Joe Jobbed yet again</a>. I suppose this happens to everyone once in a while, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept. The worst thing about joe jobs is that you get so many bounces with in a short period that genuine bouncers are easily missed.</p>
            <p>The last time I had this problem, I <a href="1391.html">looked at SPF</a> to see if it can do any good. Unfortunately not, Too few mail servers bother with SPF checks to validated the authenticity of the sender address/IP so SPF sadly is nothing more than&nbsp; a burden on the DNS server.</p>
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Joe Jobbed Again.

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            To my great surprise (nay shock), I found that you cannot redirect output to /dev/null with <em>cat</em> for certain file types. For example&nbsp; <em>cat dsl-n-01RC4.iso &gt; /dev/null</em> will result in the following error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">cat: dsl-n-01RC4.iso: Operation not supported</span></p>

            Surely this cannot be? Yet, <em>cat</em> works fine for other files - notably text files. I was trying this out to test the speed of my network and also the speeds of different protocols such as samba, FTP , NFS etc et. The plan was to mount a remote folder locally, get the contents of a large file and dump it on /dev/null&nbsp; . Since cat didn't work out I thought I would try making a small python script.

            I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is with python. Just 5 lines of code really. It did work for the first file I tried but soon as I tried a binary, I ran into this error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">IOError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported</span></p>

            I reckon that reading a line at a time make python operate in the same way cat does. I tried to switch over to binary reads but the problem didn't go away. I was getting frustrated because I could easily copy the same files using nautilus, then I thought I would try <em>cp</em>. Lo and behold that fails too.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">cp: reading `dsl-n-01RC4.iso': Operation not supported</span></p>

            Then I tried rsync and received a meaningful error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">rsync: read errors mapping "/home/raditha/.gvfs/ftp as raditha on radmedia/home/raditha/Download/winxp.iso": Operation not supported (95)
                    rsync: read errors mapping "/home/raditha/.gvfs/ftp as raditha on radmedia/home/raditha/Download/winxp.iso": Operation not supported (95)
                    ERROR: winxp.iso failed verification -- update discarded.
                    rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c031) [sender=3.0.2</span>

                I had seen rsync choke on paths with spaces on it. So I immidiately leapt to the conclusion that the spaces in the gvfs pathname could be the reason for the errors. So I tried creating a symbolic link to the gvfs mounted folder without spaces in it's pathname. This had worked for me before with rsync but this time around it didn't work with either.

                <span style="color: #000044;">In the end the real culprit turned out to be GVFS</span>. Apparently you cannot use cp, cat, rsync etc on a remote folder that is mounted through gvfs. In other words if you suse this commands on a folder inside your .gvfs you are certain to run into one of the above error.

                <span style="color: #000044;">What is the solution then? To use a 'gvfs aware' application. There are precious few around at the time but nautilus certainly is one. That does effectively rule out writing shell scripts for certain automated tasks.</span>

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"IOError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported"

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            <p>Sure there is more than one way to <a href="http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/270019">delete all episodes of a recorded program</a> with mythv - they are just not very obvious. So I decided that my first learning task with python will be to write a script that does just that. In order to do so, you need to learn how to connect to a database - that was real easy - the API is very similar to JDBC which is well, old hat. Finding 'unlink' though took a bit more time.</p>
            <p>here is the full code.</p>
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Mythtv delete all episodes of a recorded program

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            <p></p>
            <p>Well we know that fedora (a modified fedora actually) can <a href="1622.html">boot up in five seconds</a>. How long does it take to boot mine? A rather disappointing 59 seconds in fact.</p>
            <p>I don't reboot that often but had to do so a little earlier to plug in the new hard drive. (The one that was a replacement for the <a href="1643.html">dead drive</a>. I get my stuff from a place called <a href="http://www.gobigit.com/">Mylinx</a>. They have a pretty good service. I got the hard drive replaced with no questions asked. )</p>
            <p>The next time I reboot, I am going to try some tweaks particularly my firewall startup script. I think I can shave off a good five seconds by doing that. The firewall script does a <em>depmod -a</em> . before it loads the required kernel modules and even then it checks to see if it has already been loaded. There isn't any need to do that.&nbsp; It's better to have the modules load automatically at boot time</p>
            <p>I also notice that fedora mounts a lot of partitions that it shouldn't. These are partitions that are not even listed in /etc/fstab&nbsp; yet they show up as /media/disk and /media/disk-1 and so on. Those partitions are are mostly bakups and residues from old installation. I need to figure out how to disable that.</p>
            <p></p>

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Fedora boot time

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            <p>Several years ago when 64 bit java came out the sun java plugin for linux wasn't available. By the time I bought a 64 bit processor for my file server early this year, they ought to have fixed it but they haven't. No wonder sun is in decline. I had a lot of <a href="1357.html">trouble with activating the java plug in</a> on it and in the end installed the 32 bit version of firefox on it. So much water has passed under the bridge since then but the 64 bit sun java plug in is not yet available.</p>
            <p>There are other java plugins (Blackdown and IcedTea) that can be installed on 64 bit linux distros but unfortunately both of them cannot execute signed applets at the moment - so as far as I am concerned they might as well not exist. Then there is nspluginwrapper - that works with most 32bit plugins, making it possible to use them with the 64 bit firefox. However there is one plugin that doesn't work with nspluginwrapper. No prices for guessing what that one plugin is - its' sun java.</p>
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Sun Java Sucks (at least on 64 bit linux)

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            While trying sort out a recent mishap, I accidentally erased my sqlite rpm with drastic consequences: the&nbsp; Redhat Package Manager is completely broken. This. This is one top of a <a href="001577.html">complete breakdown of yum</a>. I was trying to fix yum, when I did this foolish act. Sqlite isn't even a package that can be&nbsp; be removed easily, you need to give the '-e' option to rpm but that's what I did. Now whenever you use any command of the RPM family it tells you that
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">rpm2cpio: error while loading shared libraries: libsqlite3.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</span></p>

            rpm2cpio is the last ditch effort. I have not used this command before but found a <a href="http://freesf.tnc.edu.tw/docs/rh/maximum-rpm-1.0/html/s1-rpm-miscellania-rpm2cpio.html">handy tutorial</a>. The only trouble is rpm2cpio itself cannot be executed.

            Great, now both RPM and YUM are completely broken down. Nothing can be installed except by compiling from source. Fortunatley on linux, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. I worked around the broken rpm2cpio by simply logging into another machine, downloading the sqlite RPM using wget and then using the following command to generate a cpio file:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">rpm2cpio sqlite-3.5.6-2.fc9.x86_64.rpm &gt; sqlite.cpio</p>

            I then used SCP to download it here and then extracted the file using
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">cat sqlite.cpio | cpio -idv</p>

            By doing these steps, I have managed to manually extract the contents of an rpm - even whilst the rpm binaries themselves are broken and will not execute. The next step is to place the files in their proper folders. For that I used rsync.

            I thought my troubles would be over then but RPM et al, still protest about a missing libsqlite3.so.0 , sure enough there isn't one in /usr/lib64 - but that can be easily rectified by making a sym link to libsqlite3.so

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            <p>Ever since <a href="1484.html">switching from movable type to wordpress</a>, I have been posting like mad. That in spite of my rather busy schedule. In fact I am busier now than I was about 2-3 months ago when I barely manged 2 posts a week. Heck I have an exam coming up in 10 days time and haven't even started reading. Over the past few weeks, I have blogged almost on a daily basis - on top of that I have 14 drafts waiting to be published!</p>
            <p>That probably goes to show that wordpress really is fun to use while MT isn't. But I will not be too critical, it served me well for more than 3 years specially at a time when my expectations of a blogger was very different. Movable type itself has changed, they are now more keen to target business bloggers rather than individual geeks.</p>
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Putting the fun back into blogging.

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            <p>The other day, I changed the wordpress permalinks structure on my photo blog. Once you make the change, incoming links on other sites, google search and even internal links will result in 404 errors because wordpress will no longer map your old permalinks to individual posts. You can fix it by using Dean Lee's permalink <a href="http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/">migration plugin</a>.</p>
            <p>That takes care of single posts but unfortunately the plugin doesn't work with monthly archives. In my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">photo blog</a>, the permalink format was 'numeric' (/archives/%post_id%) which results in the montly archives looking like this: <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/archives/date/2008/01">http://photos.raditha.com/archives/date/2008/01</a> . Under the new 'postname' scheme that I adopted ( /archives/%postname%/ ) the link becomes <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/archives/2008/01">http://photos.raditha.com/archives/2008/01</a> - idealy Dean's plugin should redirect the old archives page to the new one but it doesn't happen. However if you do click on the links above <em>you will</em> find that the redirection does indeed work. That's only because I have changed my .htaccess file to rewrite them. The .htaccess file now looks like this:</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Fixing the Wordpress Permalinks Migration Plugin

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            Now that most distros, Fedora in particular insist that you use UUIDs instead of device names in the /etc/fstab file, most of us know at least two different commands which can locate the UUID for a given partition. (What's that you don't know even one? try blkid).

            What if you want to do opposite; find the device name when the UUID is known? One solution is to just type 'df' and compare the mount points with the contents of the /etc/fstab - that will tell you what the device name is if your partition has been mounted. It will not work for unmounted partitions and&nbsp; the swap. When that&nbsp; happens you can try:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid</p>

            On my computer it produces something like this:
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 100px;">lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 01b06f7e-9dab-4ff0-9d05-b2f7d83b0cab -&gt; ../../sdb1
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 1d5dd1c9-d924-4640-912f-d7f463293625 -&gt; ../../sda1
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 2ccc4b5c-cac9-4479-9c37-8f891ea18db8 -&gt; ../../sdb4
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 65234e85-5d02-47f2-aadc-da5232fdaa0b -&gt; ../../sda5
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 7d745a84-f09f-43cd-b761-e94abdb72fe6 -&gt; ../../sda4
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 85732ed8-4529-4884-9cc3-f03d5f08d60a -&gt; ../../sda6
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 ace70227-ab7f-47f2-b4cd-7fc6d67df3f8 -&gt; ../../sdb5
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 bf695d17-a57c-4f3a-9d55-65fa43c12a -&gt; ../../sda2
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 c0d24b7e-20ce-4a7c-b2c9-7dc61bbfc2 -&gt; ../../sdc1
                lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-10-17 15:53 cd291369-3ea2-40a7-baff-1b9261941e74 -&gt; ../../sdb3</div>
            This listing can be used to find the UUID when the device name is known and vice verce.

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Find device name from UUID

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            <p>Many geeks complain that they are not getting enough revenue from the banners on their site. That's primarily because,only geeks visits geek sites and geeks don't click on ads. Heck nowadays, even ordinary folks are avoiding cheesy banner ads like the plague. If that's not bad enough google adsense targeting sometimes goes haywire and makes things worse:</p>
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            <p></p>

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Adsense Targeting Gone Haywire

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            <p>At my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com">photoblog</a>, I don't get as much traffic as I should. The reason is that the posts are identified by their postid ( /%post_id%/ ). As a result the urls are not keyword heavy and get lower rank. You will struggle to find any of those posts coming up top for any search.</p>
            <p>It's better to have posts identified by their names ( /%postname%/ ). I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and make the switch. Changing wordpress permalinks is a piece of cake. With the more recent versions you don't even have to edit your .htaccess file to switch from one kind of permalink structure to another. But there is a catch: what happens to the links that are already there and have been indexed by the spiders? They will now generate 404 errors.</p>
            <p>I was sure there would be at least one plugin that can translate the old URLs into the new scheme. If the worst comes to worst, I thougt I could just create a few URL rewrite rules to take care of it. But there was a plugin that can translate the urls. It's named <a href="http://www.deanlee.cn/">Dean's Permalink Migration</a> plugin and it looks like it works.</p>
            <p></p>

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Wordpress: Change Permalinks

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            <p>I read with envy that the author of <a href="http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/">powertop</a> (which I blogged about earlier) and some other blokes have managed to make Fedora <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/">boot up in 5 seconds</a>.&nbsp; In comparision, my boot time is painfully slow but it's still faster than what most other Fedora users have to suffer through and certainly a lot faster than Vista and XP boot times.</p>
            <p>I achieved this by simply disabling a lot of services that I don't use or don't like. SELinux is at the top of that list of don't likes. Sendmail is another example of a daemon that never gets started on my desktop. One service that I had forgotten to disable <em>setroubleshootd</em> . That's the first thing I did after reading that article.</p>
            <p>Some of the services that do get started are in the rc.local file, it makes things a lot faster. Most of the services have elaborate startup scripts in /etc/init.d/ aren't really aren't needed. For example you can just start mysql anytime by typing mysqld_safe you don't need a 152 line script for that.</p>
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Boot Fedora in Five Seconds.

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            I can never quite remember whether it's print_r or var_dump in PHP that can send a detailed dump of an object to the server log file.&nbsp; Who wants to remember it anyway, that's what the manual is there for. I want the manual to be instantly available, so I have a local copy. It's been working fine so for many years. What can go wrong with static HTML after all? Something did go wrong a few days ago.

            When I tried to read the documentation on <em>variable functions</em>. I get an internal server error. The (local) link that caused the error was:
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;">http://localhost/php5.2/intro.var.html</p>

            And the detailed message in the apache error log was:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Syntax error in type map, no ':' in /var/www/html/php5.2/intro.var.html for header &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;n, referer: http://localhost/php5.2/refs.basic.vartype.html</p>

            I reckoned I could sort this out by commenting out the following line in the httpd.conf file.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">#AddHandler type-map var</p>

            For good measure, I commented out a few other settings that control type mappings - the web server is being confused by the filename containing a .var in it (please see link above).
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">&lt;Directory "/var/www/error"&gt;
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; AllowOverride None
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Options IncludesNoExec
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; AddOutputFilter Includes html
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; AddHandler type-map var
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Order allow,deny
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Allow from all
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; LanguagePriority en es de fr
                #&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback
                &lt;/Directory&gt;

                and lastly. '<em>DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var</em>' became just '<em>DirectoryIndex index.html</em>'. After wards apache was restarted and I am merrily on my way. So what if the apache default page is now broken? That's only seen when there is configured website.

                That fixes that but a couple of days later I ran into another error: <a href="1613.html">subrequested from r-&gt;uri</a>
                Oh and by the way, it's print_r that can send the dump to the log file instead of the browser, not var_dump

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RTFM causes 500 internal server error

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            <p>Readers of this blog must be quite bored of my <a href="1469.html">hard drive failures</a>, but the sad fact is that I have another one on my hand. This time I know for sure that there isn't a hard ware fault the drive is a spanking new maxtor60Gb. I have reason to believe XFS was the culprit or it might have been partprobe or it might just be me.</p>
            <p>On the previous occaision when I suffered a disk failure it was a loss of a partition table and one of those partitions was XFS. The partition couldn't be recovered despite all my efforts.</p>
            <p>This hard drive was installed less than two weeks ago. It was just idling there when I decided to move /home from another drive onto it. The /home partition was getting filled up. I have been using it that way for a week when I suddenly decided to move the swap also onto it. That operation also worked without a glitch. I then deleted the swap patition and merged the newly created free space with the neigbouring partition using parted - no trouble there either.</p>
            <p>Trouble occured when I decided to create another partition on the new drive to fill up the empty space and move all my photos onto it - I have a separate partition for that but it's filling up at an alarming rate. Like the fool I am I decided I will use XFS on it. And ran the mkfs.xfs command. All this was actually done while I was working on my macbook, the commands were type in using SSH. While mkfs was running, I noticed that it was painfully slow and in fact it seemed to get stuck close to the halfway mark.</p>
            <p>At that time I walked upto the desktop to find the desktop gone. Or rather the XWindow desktop had disappeared. Ctrl-Alt-backspace brought me to the login screen but curiously all the usernames had disappeared. Since Fedora 9, I have been unable to get a console opened up with Ctrl+Alt+F1 either - but I could still open an xsession using the root account. Even then there were no noticable errors. So I tried what a windows user might have done - reboot.</p>
            <p>On reboot the machine wouldn't start up. It complains about missing UUIDS - one of the missing UUIDs is the newly created swap and the other is /home so it's time for another boring and painfull <a href="000565.html">recovery operation</a>.</p>
            <p></p>

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Hard Drive Failure ? argh not again

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            <p>I was quite surprised to learn that python does not use curly braces in the same manner that most other programming languages do - instead it relies on the levels of indentation to identify code blocks. The last time I had seen something like that was when I was using FORTRAN back in 1999.</p>
            <p>At the time, I was still in university and was working on my research project (Quantum Mechanics), I had never learnt fortran before and my attempts to persuade my lecturer to use C++ didn't quite work out. In the end I had to admit that he was right because Fortran was head and shoulders above everything else when it comes to working with complex numbers. Of the languages that I looked at only Fortran had complex numbers as a primitive data type and the other end C++ mostly relied on operator overloading.</p>
            <p>I have forgotten most of it but I am pretty sure that It will all come back if I ever decide to do a Phd. In the meantime, it's going to help me <a href="1609.html">learn python</a>.</p>
            <p></p>

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Python and Fortran

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            Having looked through some of the python introductory guides. I decide that my deep end of the pool is going to Python Server Pages. Since I am more skilled at web apps and desktop apps this is the logical choice however. I couldn't quite get off to an auspicious start - even my hello world resulted in a 500 internal server error. Of course this is not a problem with the language or my code ( I just cut and pasted the sample) but with the server configuration.

            Ever since upgrading from Fedora 32 to Fedora 64 bit, I have been having all sorts of wierd problems and had to completely remove all PHP related RPMs and install them all over again to get some of the PHP modules working as they should.

            While the browser displayed the dreaded 500 error, the apache log file had this:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Request exceeded the limit of 10 subrequest nesting levels due to probable confguration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace.</p>

            Then the error changed to something more cryptic.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">[Sat Oct 11 19:34:53 2008] [debug] core.c(3048): [client 192.168.1.198] r-&gt;uri = /work/python/
                    [Sat Oct 11 19:34:53 2008] [debug] core.c(3061): [client 192.168.1.198] subrequested from r-&gt;uri = /work/python/
                    [Sat Oct 11 19:34:53 2008] [debug] core.c(3061): [client 192.168.1.198] subrequested from r-&gt;uri = /work/python/</span>

                While scratching my head, I moved up the directory tree and to my dismay found that the 500 internal server error is still there. And now the log file says:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">[crit] [client 192.168.1.198] (13)Permission denied: /var/www/saadhu/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable</p>

            This is an error that I have seen more than once. The first time was when I moved from apache.3x to apache 2x and on the other occasions it was invariably after some mishap which resulted in my having to restore the sites either from backups or subversion. The solution is trivial (or so I thought).
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">chgrp apache /var/www/* -R</span></p>

            Certainly the erorr about .htaccess no longer shows up, but the earlier one - the subrequested error shown above, now crops up for every request. So it's back to square one.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

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subrequested from r-&gt;uri

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            <p>I know quite a few languages but I suddenly realized that I have not learned any new language for more than 10 years. Sure I did make half baked attempts to learn ColdFusion, Ruby and I am ashamed to say even C# (but using mono). Never put in the effort required and never mastered any of them. What little I learnt has already been forgotten.</p>
            <p>That doesn't mean I have been stagnating for the last 10 years, I have certainly learnt a lot of new things but they have mostly been related to architecture and design. So I reckon it's time that I add something new to my knowledge base and thought of learning python. Let's see if it turns out to be another half baked attempt.</p>
            <p>If I can hold my interest for a month, I should be able to get a good grasp of the language but unfortunately my attention span is&nbsp; short.</p>
            <p></p>

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The Serpent.

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            Over the last few days I have been looking at ways of cutting down on my power consumption. I have been looking around at different ways of doing that and one interesting tool I found is <a href="http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/">powertop</a>.&nbsp; As the name suggests it's a tool that gives 'Table Of Power' consumption. I think in the old days top used to stand for Table Of Processes.

            Powertop is a pretty cool tool and with one look at it I know why my fileserver never goes to sleep: mythbackend. On my desktop, the biggest culprits are artsd and ata_piix (whatever that is). Asterisk was also on the list but I disabled it. Powertop also suggested that I make the following change:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">echo 1500 &gt;&nbsp; /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs</p>

            It will apparently result in the swap being written to less often.

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Powertop.

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            After <a href="001583.html">upgrading from the 32 bit version of Fedora 9 to the 64 bit version</a> I am seeing all kinds of problems. I use the word upgrade because, even though the mother board and the processor have changed, the hard drives haven't and their data has been preserved.

            Here is an example of one of the problems I ran into. It's obviously because of a conflict between the 32 bit and the 64 bit libraries.
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 100px;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="e1938e8e95a18d8e82808d898e9295">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> network-scripts]# yum update gdm
                There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
                required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

                /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpgme/_gpgme.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

                Please install a package which provides this module, or
                verify that the module is installed correctly.

                It's possible that the above module doesn't match the
                current version of Python, which is:
                2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr&nbsp; 8 2008, 01:19:33)
                [GCC 4.3.0 20080404 (Red Hat 4.3.0-6)]

                If you cannot solve this problem yourself, please go to
                the yum faq at:
                http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumFaq</div>
            that could be fixed by installed 'pygpgme' but i still get:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/_sqlitecache.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32</p>

            fixed by installing sqlite-devel-3.5.6-2.fc9.x86_64.rpm

            At this stage I bused up my RPM all together by doing something silly, i had to sidetrack and fix rpm before getting back to yum (more about the tomorow). After rpm was restored, there was one more error (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/_sqlitecache.so ) that was fixed with yum-metadata-parser - now finally yum is back to normal. the first thing I did was use
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">yum update yum</p>

            to iron out whatever hidden issues there might be. That seems to have solved most things but not all of them. I still get errors about wrong elf classes popping up and need to keep removing old RPMs and installing new ones.

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Wrong Elf Class

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            Last few days, my computers have been without their covers - what with all the reinstallations/upgrades etc, etc. During this time I noticed that the hard dives get unbearable hot. I was using a couple of hard drive coolers but recently found that their fans had been completely toasted. In one of even the fan blades were falling off. Fans definitely isn't the way to go if you want to preserve the life of your hard drives. I did suffer a hard drive failure recently and most definitely want to preserve their lives. I thought of spinning them down when not in use. And came across s<a href="https://code.google.com/p/spindown/">pindown</a>

            sg3_utils is supposedly the only dependency but when I tried to compile it, there was an error
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 100px; color: #330000; margin-bottom: 10px;">g++ -O1 -pthread -c src/diskset.cpp
                In file included from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/ios:44,
                from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/istream:45,
                from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/fstream:45,
                from src/diskset.h:31,
                from src/disk.h:33,
                from src/diskset.cpp:23:
                /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/iosfwd:45:28: error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory
                In file included from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/ios:47,
                from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/istream:45,
                from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.3.0/../../../../include/c++/4.3.0/fstream:45,
                from src/diskset.h:31,
                from src/disk.h:33,
                from src/diskset.cpp:23:</div>
            This was recitified by installing libstdc++-devel but even then after installation the daemon wouldn't start. I reckon this might have something to do with upstart - that notoriously badly documented replacement for init in Fedora 9.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Starting spindownd daemon... /etc/init.d/spindown: line 91: start-stop-daemon: command not found</span></p>

            To solve this problem, I had to manually edit the init scripts. If you want a copy, drop me a line.

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Spinning Down the Hard Drives in Fedora

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            After that bait and switch the other day, I was left with the prospect of having to make three different installation of Fedora. There was no way, I could wiggle out of the first one. The machine that was sent to the office needed fedora and that was a straight forward installation. After the first few clicks, I just forgot about it and let it run it's course.

            The second machine which, was to be my new desktop was more of a problem. I sure as hell didn't want to install fedora on it again but I felt i should at least do an upgrade because the hard drives that would be connected to the new mother board contain only a 32 bit version of Fedora 9. It's even slightly more complicated than that because the mother board I initially used on it has to go back to the file/media server. Otherwise I have to go through all the tedius steps of configuring the Nvidia VGA driver, mythtv and the tv tuner card.

            So I had no choice but to upgrade. But when the installer got to that stage (upgrade existing installer) it choked; said couldn't upgrade a 32 bit installation to 64 bit. You have to reinstall. I was very reluctant to format and install (had to do that several times over the past few months). The installer advised me not to but I went ahead anyway. The upgrade completed but I ran into trouble after boot up. Gnome desktop wouldn't start up. KDE would start up but very slowly.

            I then had to update both gnome and KDE. Even then I noticed that they wouldn't start up at times it seems to happen randomly. Occasionally when that happens I see this message:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation.</span></p>

            I haven't found a solution for that (google doesn't have anything on it)

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Arrrrggghhh having to install fedora thrice again.

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            <p></p>
            <p>The office needed a new machine. We ordered a new machine (E7200 Core 2 Duo 2.53 Ghz, 2GB RAM, Asus Mobo). We waited a week. It didn't get here. We waited another week, still didn't get here. Don't want to change the supplier either. So I did a bait and switch. Well not exactly, I donated my machine to the office.</p>
            <p>The machine itself is rather old but it's the ax that a wood cutter has been using for a long , long time. He changed the handle once, then a few years later he changed the ax head. The machine I had was also like that. It was a P4 2.0 Ghz with 1GB Ram and a rather cheap mother board. The casing had been with me for a long long time and showed it's age. But I like this machine and this is what has been working as my desktop for ever so long. I have a much more powerfull machine (E 2180 2.0 Ghz , 2Gb RAM, Asus Mobo ) working as my file server. </p>
            <p>What I did was rip everything out of the casing - including the power supply from both my desktop and the file server. Then I switched the too. The old P4 went into the new casing (a high quality asus casing) and into the cheap one went the Asus Mother boad ,the 2180 VGA cards etc etc but not the hard drives. Those I put aside. </p>
            <p>So in the end I had an old machine in a new casing. Into this I installed Fedora 9 - i386 - the hard drive was a spare hard drive. I had taken out the other two drives which contained my OS and Data. These I plugged into the asus motherboard. Now I think you are suitably confused, so let me explain that again.</p>
            <p>The new Asus casing has an old mother board + old cpu + a spare hard drive. The old casing has the Asus mother board and dual core CPU that used to be my file server. Into it also went the hard drives (with OS intact) taken out of my old desktop. Got it?</p>
            <p>When the machine that was supposed to have been delivered days ago is finally ready, I will pay for it out of my own pocket , bring it home and set up a new file and media server on it. Into it will go the drives taken out of the file server that I just ripped up.</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Bait and Switch.

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            <p>I am seeing these messages when plugging in a Huawei CDMA phone with it's TI USB cable. I reckoned this might have something to do with my recent hard drive corruption and figured I ought to update my fuse packages. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out.</p>
            <p></p>
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udevd[486]: lookup_group: specified group 'fuse' unknown

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            <p>What's happening at adwords? Our ( <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a> ) ads apparently stopped running about 48 hours ago. Unfortunately it went un-noticed till now. There wasn't any alert - usually they sent two warning before ads get suspended - but they are not suspended, just don't show up.</p>
            <p>The diagnostic tools says the daily budget has been exceeded while in fact only $0.00 has been spent! When you try to change the budget ad settings say the budget is fine. This is not the first time I have seen such <a href="932.html">contradictions at google.</a></p>
            <p></p>

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What's up at Adwords?

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            <p>I tried <em>svn update</em> and got the following error:</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">Reading one svndiff window read beyond the end of the representation</span></p>
            <p>This is usually caused by an error in the repository. The moment the message popped up I knew the exact cause of the error as well. My repository is older than my working copy. You will say that is always so. Well in this case, this particular working copy is at revision 187 while the repository only has 185 revisions in it!</p>
            <p>How come? Well I <a href="1469.html">lost a hard drive</a> and lost this particular repository. I had lost another repo as well and went through the annoying process of <a href="1530.html">restoring it using working copies</a>. But I had forgotten to restore this particular repo. In the end it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.</p>
            <p>The repo contains my mails. I read and reply to mails on both my macbook and my desktop and download them onto both machines as well. The mail servers use IMAP (can't figure out why people would want to use POP3). I keep the macbook and the desktop in sync by using svn commits and updates. Unfotunately if you download into the same folder you get conflicts and because some folders contain thousands of mails the conflicts are very hard to resolve.</p>
            <p>In the end though, I had no choice but to resolve those conflicts. The thunderbird 'delete duplicates' extension was a life saver.</p>


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Reading one svndiff window read beyond the end of the representation

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            <p></p>
            <p>Ever since moving <a href="1461.html">back to Fedora</a> 9 (from <a href="1425.html">debian</a>) I have found that the <a href="https://netbeans.org">netbean</a> IDE seems to be rather sluggish. Switching between source files for example seems to take 4-5 seconds. Opening a menu seems to take at least a second as well. This is rather strange since I didn't have any problem with Fedora 8 and with debian either. Could it be Fedora, xorg, gnome, java or netbeans at fault?</p>
            <p>How come KDE is not on the list? I have given up on KDE. It's a write off on Fedora 9.</p>
            <p>Most of the suggestions regarding speeding up your IDE deal with tweaking the memory settings - I doubt if that's the problem here. I have plenty of memory to spare and netbeans uses up only about 60 Mb much less than the maximum -Xwhatever specfied in the etc/netbeans.conf files.</p>
            <p>Then I found a suggestion that you should <a href="http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqUsingMetalLFForPerformance">change to the metal look and feel</a> if you are on a mac to get a speed improvement. I have no trouble with netbeans on my macbook but I thought i would import the solution to fedora cause the default look and feel is rather lame anyway. To my pleasent suprise I found that switching the LAF does lead to a small performance improvement on F9 as well. It's not much but enough for now (till I get frustrated with it again)</p>
            <p>Netbeans is my favourite IDE and I will try to avoid having to switch to eclipse.</p>
            <p></p>

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Netbeans 6.1 - sluggish on Fedora 9

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            <p>The other day I suffered <a href="1469.html">a hard drive failure</a> and lost my subversion repository. As a result the working copies were at least 1 to 2 revisions newer than the repo. This in turn means you cannot carry out any commits or updates on it before you synchronize the two. Here is how to go about it:</p>
            <p>1) The first step is to backup your working copy.</p>
            <p>2) Then you check out the very latest version that is available into a new location.</p>
            <p>3) Use rsync to copy over the files from the working copy to the newly created location.</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><span style="color: #000033;">rsync /path/to/workingcopy/ .&nbsp; -avz --delete --exclude '.svn' </span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">make sure that you do a dry run ( --dry-run) to make sure that you get it right. Don't forget to change into the newly checked out folder before you try this command and also don't forget to replace /path/to/workingcopy/ with your actual file name.</p>
            <p>4) Find new files and add them to the repo. Do that by typing:</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><span style="color: #000033;">
                </span></p>
            <pre>svn add `svn stat | grep '^?' | cut -d' ' -f7`</pre>
            <p></p>
            <p>5) Identify files that have been deleted and remove them.</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;">svn rm <span style="color: #000033;">`svn stat | grep '^!</span><span style="color: #000033;">' | cut -d' ' -f7`</span></p>
            <p>6) Commit.</p>
            <p>7) carry on as usual.</p>
            <p>After you do all this you might find that your dog suddenly false dead the cause is very likely to be distemper rather than the instructions above. You might also find that your hard drive crashes. Have the hard drive tested for rabies.</p>


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Use the working copy to restore a subversion repo.

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            <p></p>
            <div style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f9/kde-menu.png" style="margin:10px"></div>
            <p></p>
            <p>Who ever came up with this menu system for KDE should be sent to work at Microsoft. Sure it can be turned off but yikes.</p>
            <p>I have always prefferred KDE over Gnome but finally it's now time to move to gnome. KDE's bottom taskbar needs at least 1/3 of your screen. It can be resized but then half of the clock and the kde menu icon disappear.</p>
            <p>Konqueror with it's tabs is still preferable to the tabless (so many years have passed since after it was added to konqueror amazing that they haven't caught up yet). But then there is no reason why you can't use konqueror as your file browser whiles you are in gnome.</p>
            <p>I sure wish I could figure out how to turn off the GDM debug messages in the system log file though - in the past you could do that sort of thing with gdm setup but when they made Fedora 9 they forgot to include it.</p>

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Send Them to Microsoft

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            Since moving to Debian and back again to Fedora , didn't have an occaision to meddle with the DOMDocument class in PHP till today. That's when I found PHP generate a rather annoying error message:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #330000;">PHP Fatal error: Class 'DOMDocument' not found in /tmp/domHTML.php on line 2</span></p>

            Hang on one second, I alreadyhave the PHP-XML rpm installed. How come I am getting this error? It turns out that the DOM API is provided not by the PHP-XML rpm but by the PHP-XMLRPC rpm (<a href="http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=174007">FedoraForum</a>). That's a bit lame don't you think?

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